tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-130500942024-03-13T12:47:20.605-04:00Johniac: Musings of a 70-Something GeekJohniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.comBlogger1435125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-89676738981068120602019-08-11T20:50:00.001-04:002019-08-11T20:50:17.299-04:00Open Markets Institute | Commissioner Chopra's Powerful Dissent
<br />
<div class="layout two-col fixed-width has-border" style="margin: 0 auto; max-width: 602px; min-width: 322px; overflow-wrap: break-word; width: 322px; width: calc(28000% - 167398px); word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div class="layout__inner" style="background-color: #fafafa; border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; border-collapse: collapse; border-left: 1px solid #ccc; border-right: 1px solid #ccc; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; display: table; width: 100%;">
<div class="column" style="color: #595959; float: left; font-family: Lato,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 26px; max-width: 320px; min-width: 300px; text-align: left; width: 320px; width: calc(12300px - 2000%);">
<div align="center" style="font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19px;">
<img alt="" class="gnd-corner-image gnd-corner-image-center gnd-corner-image-top gnd-corner-image-bottom" src="http://i1.cmail20.com/ei/j/68/8CC/E71/081357/csfinal/ScreenShot2019-07-25at3.37.16PM-990000000003cf3c.png" style="border: 0; display: block; height: auto; max-width: 480px; width: 100%;" width="300" />
</div>
</div>
<div class="column" style="color: #595959; float: left; font-family: Lato,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 26px; max-width: 320px; min-width: 300px; text-align: left; width: 320px; width: calc(12300px - 2000%);">
<div style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; margin-top: 12px;">
<div style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly; mso-text-raise: 4px;">
<div class="size-22" lang="x-size-22" style="font-family: futura,century gothic,corbel,sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0; text-align: center;">
<span class="font-futura">After the FTC Fails to Fix Facebook, Commissioner Chopra’s Powerful Dissent Points to a Path Forward</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 20px;">
</div>
<div class="layout one-col fixed-width has-border" style="margin: 0 auto; max-width: 602px; min-width: 322px; overflow-wrap: break-word; width: 322px; width: calc(28000% - 167398px); word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div class="layout__inner" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; border-collapse: collapse; border-left: 1px solid #ccc; border-right: 1px solid #ccc; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; display: table; width: 100%;">
<div class="column" style="color: #595959; font-family: Lato,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 26px; max-width: 600px; min-width: 320px; text-align: left; width: 320px; width: calc(28000% - 167400px);">
<div style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; margin-top: 12px;">
<div style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly; mso-text-raise: 4px;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0;">
The orginal article can be found <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.org/newsletters/2991/" target="_blank">here</a>. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0;">
On Wednesday, the
Federal Trade Commission announced the details of its $5 billion fine
and settlement with Facebook over charges that it violated a 2011
consent decree with the enforcement agency. In addition to the fine, the
FTC and Facebook agreed that Facebook would establish a privacy
committee within its board of directors to review all privacy issues and
choices along with an “independent assessor.” Other conditions of the
settlement include transparency and security measures around gathering,
storing, and sharing user information, as well as requiring Facebook
Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to certify Facebook’s ongoing
compliance with the FTC’s order. Facebook <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-j/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">also announced</a> in its second quarter earnings call that the FTC had opened an antitrust investigation into the social media giant. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 20px;">
Enforcers
and policymakers should pay particular attention to FTC Commissioner
Rohit Chopra’s powerful dissenting statement. Chopra condemned the
settlement, writing, “This framework does not protect the public — it
protects Facebook” and “ratifies Facebook’s governance structure instead
of changing it.” But Chopra’s statement also lays out where
policymakers and law enforcers should go in the future — which is to
directly address the dependence of Facebook’s business model on
“surveillance and manipulation.” </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 20px;">
</div>
<div class="layout one-col fixed-width" style="margin: 0 auto; max-width: 600px; min-width: 320px; overflow-wrap: break-word; width: 320px; width: calc(28000% - 167400px); word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div class="layout__inner" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; display: table; width: 100%;">
<div class="column" style="color: #595959; font-family: Lato,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 26px; max-width: 600px; min-width: 320px; text-align: left; width: 320px; width: calc(28000% - 167400px);">
<div align="center" style="font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19px;">
<img alt="" class="gnd-corner-image gnd-corner-image-center gnd-corner-image-top gnd-corner-image-bottom" src="http://i2.cmail20.com/ei/j/68/8CC/E71/081357/csfinal/commissioner-chopra_hires_1-9900000000079e3c.jpg" style="border: 0; display: block; height: auto; max-width: 900px; width: 100%;" width="600" />
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 20px;">
</div>
<div class="layout one-col fixed-width has-border" style="margin: 0 auto; max-width: 602px; min-width: 322px; overflow-wrap: break-word; width: 322px; width: calc(28000% - 167398px); word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div class="layout__inner" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; border-collapse: collapse; border-left: 1px solid #ccc; border-right: 1px solid #ccc; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; display: table; width: 100%;">
<div class="column" style="color: #595959; font-family: Lato,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 26px; max-width: 600px; min-width: 320px; text-align: left; width: 320px; width: calc(28000% - 167400px);">
<div style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; margin-top: 12px;">
<div style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly; mso-text-raise: 4px;">
<div class="size-12" lang="x-size-12" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 19px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0;">
Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rohit Chopra penned an forceful dissenting statement. </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 20px;">
</div>
<div class="layout one-col fixed-width has-border" style="margin: 0 auto; max-width: 602px; min-width: 322px; overflow-wrap: break-word; width: 322px; width: calc(28000% - 167398px); word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div class="layout__inner" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; border-collapse: collapse; border-left: 1px solid #ccc; border-right: 1px solid #ccc; border-top: 1px solid #ccc; display: table; width: 100%;">
<div class="column" style="color: #595959; font-family: Lato,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 26px; max-width: 600px; min-width: 320px; text-align: left; width: 320px; width: calc(28000% - 167400px);">
<div style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; margin-top: 12px;">
<div style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly; mso-text-raise: 4px;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0;">
“The case against
Facebook is about more than just privacy – it is also about the power to
control and manipulate,” Chopra wrote. “Global regulators and
policymakers need to confront the dangers associated with mass
surveillance and the resulting ability to control and influence us. The
behavioral advertising business incentives of technology platforms spur
practices that are dividing our society. The harm from this conduct is
immeasurable, and regulators and policymakers must confront it.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 20px;">
Facebook
being, after all, a private for-profit corporation, Chopra added, “We
should reasonably assume it seeks to advance its own financial gains.
Here, Facebook’s behavioral advertising business model is both the
company’s profit engine and arguably
the root cause of its widespread and systemic problems. Behavioral
advertising generates profits by turning users into products, their
activity into assets, their communities into targets, and social media
platforms into weapons of mass manipulation. We need to recognize the
dangerous threat that this business model can pose to our democracy and
economy.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 20px;">
Read Chopra’s full dissent <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-t/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">here</a> and Open Markets’ statements on the settlement <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-i/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">here</a> and <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-d/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">here</a>.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 20px;">
Also <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-h/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">see the letter</a>
from Sens. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Richard
Blumenthal, D-Conn., calling the settlement “woefully inadequate.” And
read reactions to the initial reports of the FTC’s $5 billion fine from
Sens. <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-k/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">Amy </a><a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-u/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">Klobuchar</a>, D-Minn., <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-o/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">Mark Warner</a>, D-Va., and <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-b/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">Elizabeth Warren</a>, D-Mass., and Reps. <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-n/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">David Cicilline</a>, D-R.I., and <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-p/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">Jan Schakowsky,</a> D-Ill.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 20px;">
See coverage of the FTC’s settlement quoting the Open Markets Institute from <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-x/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">PBS</a>, <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-m/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;"><em>HuffPost</em></a>, <a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-c/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;"><em>The Hill</em></a>,<em> </em>and<em> </em><a href="https://openmarketsinstitute.cmail20.com/t/j-l-mdiuily-juudtliro-q/" style="color: #40b1e5; text-decoration: underline; transition: opacity 0.1s ease-in;">CNN Business</a>. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 20px;">
Barry C. Lynn, Open Markets Institute <<a href="mailto:info@openmarketsinstitute.org">info@openmarketsinstitute.org</a>> </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 20px;">
</div>
Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-24441197277792814882019-07-22T09:55:00.002-04:002019-07-22T09:55:39.105-04:00Carl Sagan on the gift of Apollo<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.65em;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://support.planetary.org/site/R?i=oSQaSVOeyHkjkfgagj_hUQ"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/email/2019/email-header-apollo11.jpg" width="600" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
<em></em></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
<em>Today, we are celebrating one of
the greatest days in human history: The day we stepped foot on the
surface of the Moon. To celebrate with you, I wanted to share some wise
words from my old Astronomy professor, Carl Sagan. He contributed the
following article in 1994 while serving as President of The Planetary
Society. It's a great reflection on the past, with a new perspective to
take with us into the future:</em></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 2em;">
<em>—Bill</em></div>
<div style="background-color: #f6f6f6; margin: 2em 25px; text-align: center;">
<div style="background-color: #f6f6f6; padding: 1em; text-align: center;">
<em>"The gates of Heaven are open wide; off I ride..."<br />
Ch'u Tz'u (China, ca. 3rd century B.C.E.)</em></div>
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
It's a sultry night in July. You've
fallen asleep in the armchair. Abruptly, you startle awake, disoriented.
The television set is on, but not the sound. You strain to understand
what you're seeing. Two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets
are softly dancing under a pitch-black sky. They make strange little
skipping motions, which propel them upward amid barely perceptible
clouds of dust. But something is wrong. They take too long to come down.
Encumbered as they are, they seem to be flying—a little. You rub your
eyes, but the dreamlike tableau persists.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Of all the events surrounding Apollo
11's landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, my most vivid recollection is
its unreal quality. Yes, it was an astonishing technological
achievement and a triumph for the United States. Yes, the
astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, the last
keeping solitary vigil in lunar orbit—displayed death-defying courage.
Yes, as Armstrong said as he first alighted, this was a historic step
for the human species. But if you turned off the byplay between Mission
Control and the Sea of Tranquility, with its deliberately mundane and
routine chatter, and stared into that black-and-white television
monitor, you could glimpse that we humans had entered the realm of myth
and legend.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="line-height: 1.3em; margin: 1.6em 25px 2em; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://support.planetary.org/site/R?i=Ljl4WpoNLqunx4SWjOEE2A"><img align="middle" border="0" height="208" src="https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/email/2019/email-apollo-panorama.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 8px;" width="546" /></a></div>
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
We knew the Moon from our earliest
days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the
savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone
tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built
cities and set out to subdue the Earth. Folklore and popular songs
celebrate a mysterious connection between the Moon and love. Especially
when we lived out-of-doors, it was a major—if oddly intangible—presence
in our lives.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
The Moon was a metaphor for the
unattainable: "You might as well ask for the Moon," they used to say.
For most of our history, we had no idea what it was. A spirit? A god? A
thing? It didn't look like something big far away, but more like
something small nearby—something the size of a plate, maybe, hanging in
the sky a little above our heads. <em>Walking</em> on the Moon would
have seemed a screwball idea; it made more sense to imagine somehow
climbing up into the sky on a ladder or on the back of a giant bird,
grabbing the Moon and bringing it down to Earth. Nobody ever succeeded,
although there were myths aplenty about heroes who had tried.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Not until a few centuries ago did the idea of the Moon as a <em>place</em>,
a quarter million miles away, gain wide currency. And in that brief
flicker of time, we've gone from the earliest steps in understanding the
Moon's nature to walking and joyriding on its surface. We calculated
how objects move in space; liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big
rockets, telemetry, reliable electronics, inertial guidance and much
else. Then we sailed out into the sky.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
The Moon is no longer unattainable. A
dozen humans, all Americans, have made those odd bounding motions they
called "moonwalks" on the crunchy, cratered, ancient gray lava-
beginning on that July day in 1969. But since 1972, no one from any
nation has ventured back. Indeed, none of us has gone <em>anywhere</em> since the glory days of <em>Apollo</em>
except into low Earth orbit—like a toddler who takes a few tentative
steps outward and then, breathless, retreats to the safety of his
mother's skirts.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was <em>Apollo</em> really about?</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
The scope and audacity of John
Kennedy's May 25, 1961, message to a joint session of Congress on
"Urgent National Needs"—the speech that launched the <em>Apollo</em>
program—dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not
yet conceived, navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order
to send a man to an unknown world—</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
a world not yet explored, not even in a
preliminary way, not even by robots—and we would bring him safely back,
and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident
pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth
orbit.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
As a newly minted PhD, I actually
thought all this had something centrally to do with science. But
President Kennedy did not talk about discovering the origin of the Moon,
or even about bringing samples of it back for study. All he seemed to
be interested in was sending someone there and bringing him home. It was
a kind of gesture. Kennedy's science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, later
told me he had made a deal with the president: if Kennedy would not
claim that Apollo was about science, then he, Wiesner, would support it.
So if not science, what?</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
The Apollo program is really about
politics, others told me. This sounded more promising. Nonaligned
nations would be tempted to drift toward the Soviet Union if it was
ahead in space exploration, if the U.S. showed insufficient "national
vigor." I didn't follow. Here was the United States, ahead of the Soviet
Union in virtually every area of technology—the world's economic,
military and, on occasion, even moral leader—and Indonesia would go
Communist because Yuri Gagarin beat John Glenn to Earth orbit? What's so
special about space technology? Suddenly I understood.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Sending people to orbit the Earth or
robots to orbit the Sun requires rockets-big, reliable, powerful
rockets. Those same rockets can be used for nuclear war. The same
technology that transports a man to the Moon can carry nuclear warheads
halfway around the world. The same technology that puts an astronomer
and a telescope in Earth orbit can also put up a laser "battle station."</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Even back then, there was fanciful talk
in military circles, East and West, about space as the new "high
ground," about the nation that "controlled" space "controlling" the
Earth. Of course strategic rockets were already being tested on Earth.
But heaving a ballistic missile with a dummy warhead into a target zone
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean doesn't buy much glory. Sending
people into space captures the attention and imagination of the world.
You wouldn't spend the money to launch astronauts for this reason alone,
but of all the ways of demonstrating rocket potency, this one works
best. It was a rite of national manhood; the shape of the boosters made
this point readily understood without anyone actually having to explain
it. The communication seemed to be transmitted from unconscious mind to
unconscious mind without the higher mental faculties catching a whiff of
what was going on.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
When President Kennedy formulated the
Apollo program, the Defense Department had a slew of space projects
under development—ways of carrying military personnel up into space,
ways of conveying them around the Earth, robot weapons on orbiting
platforms intended to shoot down satellites and ballistic missiles of
other nations. Apollo supplanted these programs. They never reached
operational status. A case can be made then that Apollo served another
purpose—to move the US-Soviet space competition from a military to a
civilian arena. There are some who believe that Kennedy intended Apollo
as a substitute for an arms race in space. Maybe.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Six more missions followed Apollo 11,
all but one of which successfully landed on the lunar surface. Apollo 17
was the first to carry a scientist. As soon as he got there, the
program was canceled. The first scientist and the last human to land on
the Moon were the same person. The program had already served its
purpose that July night in 1969. The half-dozen subsequent missions were
just momentum.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="line-height: 1.3em; margin: 1.6em 25px 2em; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://support.planetary.org/site/R?i=-jTSm8ZAexjYOBOyeWvVHQ"><img align="middle" border="0" height="446" src="https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/email/2019/email-apollo-17-lrv.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 8px;" width="546" /></a></div>
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Apollo was not mainly about science. It
was not even mainly about space. Apollo was about ideological
confrontation and nuclear war—often described by such euphemisms as
world "leadership" and national "prestige." Nevertheless, good space
science was done. We now know much more about the composition, age and
history of the Moon and the origin of the lunar landforms. We have made
progress in understanding where the Moon came from. Some of us have used
lunar cratering statistics to better understand the Earth at the time
of the origin of life. But more important than any of this, Apollo
provided an aegis, an umbrella under which brilliantly engineered robot
spacecraft were dispatched throughout the solar system, making that
preliminary reconnaissance of dozens of new worlds. The offspring of
Apollo have now reached the planetary frontiers.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
If not for Apollo—and, therefore, if
not for the political purpose it served—I doubt whether the historic
American expeditions of exploration and discovery throughout the solar
system would have occurred. The Mariners, Vikings, Voyagers, Magellan,
Galileo and Cassini are among the gifts of Apollo. Something similar is
true for the pioneering Soviet efforts in solar system exploration,
including the first soft landings of robot spacecraft—Luna 9, Mars 3,
Venera 8—on other worlds.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Apollo conveyed a confidence, energy
and breadth of vision that did capture the imagination of the world.
That too was part of its purpose. It inspired an optimism about
technology, an enthusiasm for the future. If we could go to the Moon,
what else was now possible? Even those who were not admirers of the
United States readily acknowledged that—whatever the underlying reason
for the program—the nation had, with Apollo, achieved greatness.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
When you pack your bags for a big trip,
you never know what's in store for you. The Apollo astronauts on their
way to and from the Moon photographed their home planet. It was a
natural thing to do, but it had consequences that few foresaw. For the
first time, the inhabitants of Earth could see their world from
above—the whole Earth, Earth in color, Earth as an exquisite spinning
white and blue ball set against the vast darkness of space. Those images
helped awaken our slumbering planetary consciousness. They provide
incontestable evidence that we all share the same vulnerable planet.
They remind us of what is important and what is not.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
We may have found that perspective just
in time, just as our technology threatens the habitability of our
world. Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however
mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the
inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of Earth is its clear
and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo. What began
in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is
the essential precondition for our survival.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 1em;">
Travel is broadening.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 2em;">
It's time to hit the road again.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 25px 2em;">
- Carl Sagan<br />
Founder and First President for The Planetary Society</div>
<div style="background-color: #f6f6f6; margin: 2em 25px;">
<div style="background-color: #f6f6f6; padding: 1em;">
<a href="http://support.planetary.org/site/R?i=2SFQHVE7_2Viu1alppZ4GA">This article</a> was adapted from a chapter Carl Sagan's book, <em>Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space</em>. It was originally featured in the May/June 1994 issue of the Planetary Society member magazine, <em><a href="http://support.planetary.org/site/R?i=07vQYdMMrb3oAGd8s0cHtg">The Planetary Report</a></em>.</div>
</div>
Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-72881702341145586042013-07-06T08:07:00.001-04:002013-07-06T08:07:17.616-04:00Quote of the Day...Will McAvoy (WillMcAvoyACN):
"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man." -- Thomas Paine
http://twitter.com/WillMcAvoyACN/status/353322962377637888
(Sent via Seesmic http://www.seesmic.com)Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com1Douglass Hills, Douglass Hills38.23785 -85.552734tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-29399505414030265472013-02-18T16:59:00.001-05:002013-02-18T16:59:31.566-05:00Big Box Implosion<p dir=ltr>Knustler holds forth on the coming collapse of the "big box" marketing model, albeit using some shaky assumptions along the way. Bottom line: chain stores go away and the local economy returns.</p>
<p dir=ltr><a href="http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/02/scale-implosion.html">Scale Implosion - Clusterfuck Nation</a><br>
</p>
Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-82428334854034668742013-01-14T23:05:00.001-05:002013-01-14T23:05:35.680-05:00Climate Change Set to Make America Hotter, Drier and More Disaster-prone | Alternet<div class='posterous_autopost'>Published on Alternet (<a href="http://www.alternet.org">http://www.alternet.org</a>)<br />Home > New Report Outlines Our Future: Climate Change Set to Make America Hotter, Drier and More Disaster-prone<br />The Guardian [1] / By Suzanne Goldenberg [2]<p /> New Report Outlines Our Future: Climate Change Set to Make America Hotter, Drier and More Disaster-prone<p>January 14, 2013 | <br />Future generations of Americans can expect to spend 25 days a year sweltering in temperatures above 100F (38C), with climate change [3] on course to turn the country into a hotter, drier, and more disaster-prone place.</p><p>The National Climate Assessment, released in draft form on Friday [4] , provided the fullest picture to date of the real-time effects of climate change on US life, and the most likely consequences for the future.</p><p>The 1,000-page report, the work of the more than 300 government scientists and outside experts, was unequivocal on the human causes of climate change, and on the links between climate change and extreme weather.</p><p>Climate change is already affecting the American people, the draft report said. Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense including heat waves, heavy downpours and in some regions floods and drought [5]. Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and Arctic sea ice are melting. </p><p>The report, which is not due for adoption until 2014, was produced to guide federal, state and city governments in America in making long-term plans.</p><p>By the end of the 21st century, climate change is expected to result in increased risk of asthma and other public health emergencies, widespread power blackouts, and mass transit shutdowns, and possibly shortages of food.</p><p>Proactively preparing for climate change can reduce impacts, while also facilitating a more rapid and efficient response to changes as they happen, said Katharine Jacobs, the director of the National Climate Assessment.</p><p>The report will be open for public comment on Monday.</p><p>Environmental groups said they hoped the report would provide Barack Obama with the scientific evidence to push for measures that would slow or halt the rate of climate change – sparing the country some of the worst effects.</p><p>The report states clearly that the steps taken by Obama so far to reduce emissions are not close to sufficient to prevent the most severe consequences of climate change.</p><p>As climate change and its impacts are becoming more prevalent, Americans face choices, the report said. Beyond the next few decades, the amount of climate change will still largely be determined by the choices society makes about emissions. Lower emissions mean less future warming and less severe impacts. Higher emissions would mean more warming and more severe impacts. </p><p>As the report made clear: no place in America had gone untouched by climate change. Nowhere would be entirely immune from the effects of future climate change.</p><p>A heatwave swept across the US in 2011, with temperatures reaching over 110F (43C). Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP</p><p>Some of those changes are already evident: 2012 was by far the hottest year on record, fully a degree hotter than the last such record – an off-the-charts rate of increase.</p><p>Those high temperatures were on course to continue for the rest of the century, the draft report said. It noted that average US temperatures had increased by about 1.5F since 1895, with more than 80% of this increase since 1980.</p><p>The rise will be even steeper in future, with the next few decades projected for temperatures 2 to 4 degrees warmer in most areas. By 2100, if climate change continues on its present course, the country can expect to see 25 days a year with temperatures above 100F.</p><p>Night-time temperatures will also stay high, providing little respite from the heat.</p><p>Certain regions are projected to heat up even sooner. West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware can expect a doubling of days hotter than 95 degrees by the 2050s. In Texas and Oklahoma, the draft report doubled the probability of extreme heat events.</p><p>Those extreme temperatures would also exact a toll on public health, with worsening air pollution, and on infrastructure increasing the load for ageing power plants.</p><p>This 8 November 2011 image shows a storm bearing down on Alaska. Photograph: Ho/AFP/Getty Images</p><p>But nowhere will see changes as extreme as Alaska, the report said.</p><p>The most dramatic evidence is in Alaska, where average temperatures have increased more than twice as fast as the rest of the country, the draft report said. Of all the climate-related changes in the US, the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice cover in the last decade may be the most striking of all. </p><p>Other regions will face different extreme weather scenarios. The north-east, in particular, is at risk of coastal flooding because of sea-level rise and storm surges, as well as river flooding, because of an increase in heavy downpours.</p><p>A flooded farm along the Mississippi River is seen in Cairo, Illinois. Photograph: Stephen Lance Dennee/AP</p><p>The north-east has experienced a greater increase in extreme precipitation over the past few decades than any other region in the US, the report said. Between 1958 and 2010, the north-east saw a 74% increase in heavy downpours.</p><p>The midwest was projected to enjoy a longer growing season – but also an increased risk of extreme events like last year's drought. By mid-century, the combination of temperature increases and heavy rainfall or drought were expected to pull down yields of major US food crops, the report warned, threatening both American and global food security.</p><p>The report is the most ambitious scientific exercise ever undertaken to catalogue the real-time effects of climate change, and predict possible outcomes in the future.</p><p>It involved more than 300 government scientists and outside experts, compared to around 30 during the last such effort when George W Bush was president. Its findings were also much broader in scope, Jacobs said.</p><p>There were still unknowns though, the report conceded, especially about how the loss of sea ice in Greenland and Antarctica will affect future sea-level rise.</p><p>Campaign groups said they hoped the report would spur Obama to act on climate change in his second term. The draft assessment offers a perfect opportunity for President Obama at the outset of his second term, said Lou Leonard, director of the climate change programme for the World Wildlife Fund. When a similar report was released in 2009, the Administration largely swept it under the rug. This time, the President should use it to kick-start a national conversation on climate change. </p><p>However, the White House was exceedingly cautious on the draft release, noting in a blogpost [6]: The draft NCA is a scientific document—not a policy document—and does not make recommendations regarding actions that might be taken in response to climate change. </p><p>See more stories tagged with:<br />climate change [7],<br />water [8],<br />drought [9],<br />heat [10]<br />Source URL: <a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-report-outlines-our-future-climate-change-set-make-america-hotter-drier-and-more">http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-report-outlines-our-future-climate-ch...</a><br />Links:<br />[1] <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/</a><br />[2] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/suzanne-goldenberg">http://www.alternet.org/authors/suzanne-goldenberg</a><br />[3] <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change</a><br />[4] <a href="http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/">http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/</a><br />[5] <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/drought">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/drought</a><br />[6] <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/11/expanding-climate-change-conversation">http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/11/expanding-climate-change-conversation</a><br />[7] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change">http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change</a><br />[8] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/water-0">http://www.alternet.org/tags/water-0</a><br />[9] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/drought-0">http://www.alternet.org/tags/drought-0</a><br />[10] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/heat-0">http://www.alternet.org/tags/heat-0</a><br />[11] <a href="http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B">http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</a></p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-37019170314900454042012-09-26T20:17:00.001-04:002012-09-26T20:17:54.791-04:00Alzheimer's: Diabetes of the Brain? l Suzanne DeLaMonte doctoroz.com<div class='posterous_autopost'>By Dr. Suzanne DeLaMonte<br />Alpert Medical School, Brown University<br />Neuropathologist, Rhode Island Hospital<p>Although we’ve always known that Alzheimer’s disease is typically associated with numerous tangles and plaque in the brain, the exact cause of these abnormalities has been hard to pin down. Now, we may be closer to an answer.</p><p> </p><p>In many respects, Alzheimer’s is a brain form of diabetes. Even in the earliest stages of disease, the brain’s ability to metabolize sugar is reduced. Normally, insulin plays a big role in helping the brain take up sugar from the blood. But, in Alzheimer’s, insulin is not very effective in the brain. Consequently, the brain cells practically starve to death.</p><p> </p><p>How is that like diabetes?</p><p>These days, most people with diabetes have Type 2 diabetes mellitus. Basically, cells throughout the body become resistant to insulin signals. In an effort to encourage cells to take up more sugar from the blood, the pancreas increases the output of insulin. Imagine having to knock louder on a door to make the person inside open up and answer. The high levels of insulin could damage small blood vessels in the brain, and eventually lead to poor brain circulation. This problem could partly explain why Type 2 diabetes harms the brain. In Alzheimer’s, the brain, especially parts that deal with memory and personality, become resistant to insulin.</p><p> </p><p>Why does the brain need insulin?</p><p>As in most organs, insulin stimulates brain cells to take up glucose or sugar, and metabolize it to make energy. Insulin also is very important for making chemicals known as neurotransmitters, which are needed for neurons to communicate with each other. Insulin also stimulates many functions that are needed to form new memories and conquer tasks that require learning and memory.</p><p> </p><p>Where does the insulin come from in the brain?</p><p>Very sensitive tests showed that insulin is made in the brain. It’s made in neurons, and the hormone made in the brain is the same as that produced in the pancreas. This point may seem surprising, but if you consider the fact that every other gut hormone is also made in the brain, it only makes sense that insulin would be among them. Insulin that’s made by the pancreas and present in blood does gets into the brain as well.</p><p>Are people with diabetes more likely to get Alzheimer’s?</p><p>Absolutely. Their risk is doubled, at least. Obesity also increases the risk of cognitive impairment, or mental decline. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has diabetes will develop Alzheimer’s or that all people with Alzheimer’s have diabetes. The important thing to recognize is that there is considerable overlap between Alzheimer’s and diabetes.</p><p>I’ve never heard that. Is this idea new?</p><p>In reality, before about 1980, there was very little overlap between Alzheimer’s and diabetes. In fact, up until about 1980, deaths from diabetes were declining in the United States. That’s probably because of the improvements in medical treatment. But, between 1980 and now, the deaths from Alzheimer’s and diabetes have skyrocketed at alarming rates. The diabetes story is especially frightening because, everyone agrees that today we have much better medical treatments for diabetes than we did in the 1960s and 1970s – so, why should the death rates be so high now?</p><p> </p><p>Maybe people are just living longer. Isn’t that the case?</p><p>People are living longer, but more important, they are surviving with various diseases that used to be fatal. On the surface, this argument might explain the increasing death rate trends for diabetes and Alzheimer’s. But, closer examination of the data demonstrated something entirely different and, in fact, surprising.</p><p> </p><p>We compared the Alzheimer’s death rates in 1980, to those in 2005, but instead of looking at the entire population as a single group, we examined the death rates according to age group. We looked at Alzheimer’s death rates in people between 45 and 54 years old, 55 and 64, 65 and 74, and so on. We found that within every single age group, the Alzheimer death rate was much higher in 2005 than it was in 1980. In other words, deaths from Alzheimer’s were considerably higher for 60 year olds in 2005 than they were in 1980. Worse yet, over that time period and until these days, the Alzheimer’s death rates continued to climb, year by year. Diabetes death rates increased sharply within each age group, just as they did for Alzheimer’s.</p><p> </p><p>Most people think Alzheimer’s is caused by a gene problem.</p><p>Alzheimer’s disease occurrences are not strictly genetic. In fact, the vast majority of Alzheimer’s occurs sporadically.</p><p>If it’s not genetic, what else could be the cause of Alzheimer’s?</p><p>Truly genetic diseases do not change over a 30-year period. That interval is too short to affect rates of genetic diseases that arise only in middle-aged or elderly people. The human breeding, growth, development and aging cycle is much longer than 30 years. In contrast, disease like HIV/AIDS and lung cancer are clearly exposure-related, so their mortality rates can be modified within a short period if the exposure to the disease-causing agents are reduced.</p><p> </p><p>Could diabetes and Alzheimer’s be caused by some types of exposures?</p><p>We have reasonable evidence that human exposure to nitrosamines is at the root cause of not only Alzheimer’s, but several other insulin-resistance diseases, including Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, also known as NASH, and visceral obesity. </p><p> </p><p>The elimination of local farms in favor of mega-farms requires transport of food for long distances. To prolong shelf-life, preservatives are added. The problem is worsened with transport of “fresh” foods from across the Pacific Ocean. Nitrites are added to meats and processed foods for flavor and coloring. High levels of nitrates added to fertilizers can be incorporated into produce and then converted to nitrites and finally nitrosamines in the body.</p><p> </p><p>Nitrosamines contaminate many processed foods, including fish, cheeses, hotdogs, ground beef, smoked meats like bacon, smoked turkey and ham, and beer. Originally, nitrites were added to food as preservatives to prevent salmonella infection from contaminated meet. The policy remains in place. Although efforts have been made to reduce the levels, nitrites are still added as preservatives. Over time, Western societies, particularly in the US, have been chronically exposed to increasing amounts of nitrosamines due to continuous consumption of processed foods.</p><p> </p><p>Nitrosamines are well-recognized cancer-causing agents. In high doses, they cause cancers in many organs. One of the main toxins in tobacco is a nitrosamine. However, low chronic exposures have cumulative effects. </p><p> </p><p>Years ago, a few scientists suggested that nitrosamines might cause diabetes. The concept was not pursued until now. We performed experiments in the laboratory and showed that very low, limited exposures to nitrosamines (the type found in food) cause Alzheimer’s-type brain degeneration, dementia, diabetes, fatty liver disease and obesity. Adding high fat to the diet made the disease-causing effects of nitrosamines much worse.</p><p>How were these findings reached?</p><p>We were working on the idea that insulin resistance in the brain was an important cause of disease and injected another drug into the brain to see what would happen. Instead of getting what we were looking for, we found Alzheimer’s. Very soon after that, I realized that the drug I used was a nitrosamine. A bell went off in my head and suddenly I understood the problem. All of the major diseases related to insulin resistance, which are now epidemic in the United States, could be caused by exposure to low doses of nitrosamines over a period of years.</p><p> </p><p>How can I reduce my risk?</p><p>For now, the main message is to stop getting exposed. There are small steps and larger ones. Protect yourself by looking for sodium nitrite on food labels. Avoid processed foods. Eat organically grown foods. Push policies to return farming back to local environments to gain control over how food is produced and eliminate requirements for toxic preservatives. Educate children and provide only healthful food choices. Learn to cook and teach cooking in public schools. Pack a healthful lunch the night before for easy grab-and-go in the morning.</p><p> </p><p> </p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-7257668480602733562012-09-11T19:57:00.001-04:002012-09-11T19:57:42.020-04:00Thomas Jefferson, science enthusiast | Guardian News<div class='posterous_autopost'>Whatever flawed versions of Thomas Jefferson are peddled by the American right, we know he loved his science.<p>If you want to enter an alternative reality, all you need to do is type words like Jefferson , religion and history into Google. The American right wing's attitude to some aspects of science is deeply troublesome, but so too is their rewriting of their national history. The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, by David Barton, is a case in point. It is endorsed by Glenn Beck despite enormous criticism from historians and publishers.</p><p>In July, readers of History News Network voted it the Least Credible History Book in Print for its distortion of history and of Jefferson's views. The particular issues are identified around religion, slavery and the relationship between church and state, which Barton presents among seven lies told about the third president of the United States.</p><p>Barton has little to say about Jefferson's intense interest in science. He would have done if Jefferson had lived a couple of generations later, as the statesman then might have accepted the geological evidence of the Earth's age (which he was not inclined to do in the first decade of the century, when there was much dispute among geologists) and Darwin's theory of evolution, and Barton might have had an eighth lie to deal with.</p><p>But there is little in established 18th and early 19th century science that the Tea Party would feel the need to reject. This is a reminder of the fact that in Jefferson's time there was no perception of a war between science and religion and, indeed, that the American right do not necessarily have a blanket anti-science approach, but theological, political and ideological issues with particular fields.</p><p>However, where Barton does bring up science, he goes rather wrong. The main passage focuses on this Jefferson quote:</p><p>Bacon, Locke and Newton, I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral Sciences.</p><p>Quite rightly, of course, Barton can point to the religiosity of these heroes of science, but he glosses over Newton's unorthodoxy, denies Locke's and presents this quote as part of his argument against the lie that Jefferson promoted secular education. This is quite bizarre, turning a blind eye to Locke's advocacy of religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. A quick read of Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration would put him right.</p><p>An interest in science and advocacy of secularism in public life were, and are, by no means necessary bedfellows. Likewise, the interest of leaders and politicians of all stripes in many or most aspects of science and technology, which underpin national and military success in so many areas, goes without saying. Yet Jefferson's interest in science was part of his personal identity in a way that it is hard to imagine the likes of Glenn Beck celebrating.</p><p>This summer I visited the American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia, of which Jefferson was a key early member, to do some research into the Lewis and Clark Expedition across the American continent in 1804-06, a scientific and imperialistic venture that was Jefferson's pet project.</p><p>What I found fascinating in reading about this expedition was not just Jefferson's support for a prestige national project, but his close involvement in the scientific training of Merriweather Lewis, his secretary, in preparation, and ready input to discussions about instrumentation. Jefferson was, according to an article on the instruments of the expedition, inordinately fond of an equatorial theodolite he owned, made by London instrument-maker Jesse Ramsden, and thought they should take something similar.</p><p>At the APS I dipped into some of Jefferson's correspondence with Robert Patterson, the professor of mathematics at Philadelphia. More than once he wrote to thank Patterson for copies of the Nautical Almanac (the small books of astronomical tables for navigation published by the British Board of Longitude), as well as other scientific tracts, and for advice on buying and repairing instruments.</p><p>On 21 March 1811 he added:</p><p>before I entered on the business of the world I was much attached to Astronomy & had laid a sufficient foundation at College to have pursued it with satisfaction and advantage. but after 40 years of abstraction from it, and my mathematical acquirement coated over with rust, I find myself equal only to such simpler operations & practices in it as serve to amuse me. but they give me great amusement, and the more as I have some excellent instruments...</p><p>I don't suppose that there is anything here that would particularly challenge the Tea Partyers. It is not climate science or evolution, but an enthusiasm for tracking Jupiter's satellites. In any case, Barton's claims have already been thoroughly taken down by historians. And yet, throwing up an image of a Founding Father who enjoyed tinkering with precision instruments, perusing astronomical tables and corresponding with university professors seems as good a response as any to some of the painfully bad history being produced.<p /> © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.<br />;</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-4239316839656447572012-09-03T10:21:00.001-04:002012-09-03T10:21:52.208-04:00Reconsidering the Citizens United Decision | Lawrence Lessig The Atlantic Reuters<div class='posterous_autopost'>Lawrence Lessig | Aug 4, 2012<p>The (Almost) Brilliance of Representative Dingell and His Friends</p><p>Can the longest-sitting member of Congress force the Supreme Court to reconsider its Citizens United decision?</p><p>Representative John Dingell (D-MI), the longest-sitting member of Congress, introduced a bill Thursday designed to force the Supreme Court to reconsider its Citizens United decision. Along with at least ten co-sponsors, Dingell's Restoring Confidence in Our Democracy Act, would ban corporations and unions from making independent political expenditures. It would also subject Super PACs to the same contribution limits that exist with other PACs. Dingell intends the bill to provide the factual record which details the negative effects of increased spending in our elections. That factual record, he hopes, will get the Court to reverse itself, and restore Congress' power to limit a form of spending that Dingell (rightly) believes has eroded even further America's confidence in our democracy. </p><p>Dingell's bill, however, is effectively two bills-- one that would require the Court to reverse itself, if indeed the new law were upheld, and the other that would not require the Court to reverse itself but would instead give the Court a chance to address a kind of corruption that so far the Supreme Court has ignored. It is unlikely (in the extreme) that the Court is going to reverse itself. But if framed properly, Dingell's bill could well map a way for Congress to staunch the corrupting influence of Super PAC spending without forcing the Court to eat its Citizens United words.</p><p>Despite all the ruckus, the holding in Citizens United is actually quite narrow. All the Court decided was that an (effectively) absolute ban on independent political expenditures by corporations could not survive First Amendment review, because nobody could believe that the speech that was being abridged was speech that betrayed quid pro quo corruption. Citizens United is a non-profit corporation. Its desire was to fund the distribution of a film about Hillary Clinton. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act seemed to forbid such funding, at least from the corporation's treasury. The Supreme Court had to decide whether such an absolute ban should be permitted.</p><p>In the past, the Court had upheld limitations on political speech when they were necessary to avoid corruption or the appearance of corruption. So the question for the Court in Citizens United was whether every dollar spent by a corporation (independently of a campaign) to promote one political candidate over another was an instance of corruption. </p><p>The Court held -- and was right to hold -- that it wasn't. Not every independent political expenditure is evidence of a bribe or quid pro quo influence peddling. Sometimes, believe it or not, an independent expenditure is just an independent expenditure. So if the only basis the Court has for upholding a restriction on political speech is quid pro quo corruption, or the appearance of quid pro quo corruption, that ground is not solid enough to bear the weight of a complete ban on independent expenditures by corporations or by anyone.</p><p>The first part of Dingell's bill is inconsistent with this principle. But interestingly, the second part is not -- or at least, is not necessarily. And if effectively insulated from the constitutional taint of the first part, could provide a critical vehicle for reestablishing a power that Congress certainly should have.</p><p>The second part of Dingell's bill simply limits contributions to so called Super PACs, by requiring that they be subject to the same contribution caps that any other PAC must obey. Crucially, the justification for this limit need have nothing to do with quid pro quo corruption.</p><p>As I've explained on these pages again and again, the Framers of our Constitution gave us a Republic. By a Republic, they meant a representative democracy. And by a representative democracy, they meant a government that in the legislative branch at least was to be, as Federalist 52 describes it, dependent upon the People alone. </p><p>In the 225 years since, Congress has evolved a different dependence -- a dependence not upon the People alone but increasingly, a dependence upon the funders of campaigns as well.</p><p>But here's the obvious problem: the Funders are not the People. As I've written again and again, .26 percent of America gives more than $200 to any congressional candidate; .05 percent of America gives the maximum amount to any congressional campaign; .01 percent gives more than $10,000 in an election cycle; through February, .000063 percent of America -- 196 citizens -- gave close to 80 percent of Super PAC contributions. And according to U.S. PIRG and Demos, 1,000 citizens of the United States (or so we assume) have given more than 94 percent of Super PAC contributions so far.</p><p>No one could deny that politicians are dependent upon their funders. Nor could anyone believe these funders are a fair representation of the People. And thus, no one should doubt that we have allowed the system our Framers intended to be -- in a word -- corrupted. Ours is not a government with a legislature dependent upon the People alone. It is a government with a legislature dependent upon the People and upon a different and conflicting group -- the Funders. </p><p>That gap between the Funders and the People was large enough before Citizens United. It has only grown worse since. And it is this gap that constitutes the corruption of our political system. Not quid pro quo corruption but dependence corruption -- a type of corruption that was if anything more important to the Framers than the corruptions of Rod Blagojevich or Randy Duke Cunningham.</p><p>The way to attack this corruption is not to ban all speech by corporations, or unions, or individuals. It is instead to limit contributions that any individual or corporation can make, so that no one could reasonably believe that such contributions created a dependence that conflicted with a dependence upon the People alone. In my view, even that wouldn't be enough: We will end dependence corruption only when Congress enacts a system of citizen-funded campaigns. But Congress should be free to start somewhere, and beginning with the explosion of large and dominating independent contributions is a reasonable first step.</p><p>This is precisely what the second part of Representative Dingell's bill does: It doesn't purport to limit the spending of Super PACs; it instead limits the contributions made to Super PACs. And the justification for that limit, at least from the perspective of the Framers, could not be clearer: Congress is fully justified in limiting the role that contributors to Super PACs play, so that Members do not become dependent upon those contributors to Super PACs, and thereby less dependent upon the People.</p><p>Not because anyone need believe that Congress is being bought. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not the point. The point is dependence: to assure our political system is not dependent on an influence that conflicts with a dependence upon the People alone. The conflict is a corruption. The First Amendment should permit Congress to remedy that corruption.</p><p>Dingell deserves real credit here. Among Democrats especially, all the action is either with the Disclose Act, or in the amend the Constitution crowd. But disclosure alone won't solve anything. And there's a better chance that I'd win a gold medal at the Olympics than that the United States Senate is going to muster 67 votes for any constitutional amendment. It takes insight and wisdom to see where reform might be possible -- something I missed in my recent testimony to the Senate. Let's hope it is a point more in the House, and at least 50 in the Senate, come to see.</p><p>Copyright 2012 The Atlantic Monthly Group</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-80634006191140839532012-08-28T21:29:00.001-04:002012-08-28T21:29:26.776-04:00The Abuse of Overparenting | Dr. Lisa Firestone psychalive.org<div class='posterous_autopost'>By Dr. Lisa Firestone<br />I recently watched my 11-year-old nephew play basketball in his local league. As I took in the scene of the freshly polished court, the paid referees, illuminated scoreboard, and live buzzers, I couldn’t help but think how grown up my nephew and his team had become. There they were independently taking coach instructions, chatting with the refs, and playing with skill and technique. That is until something out-of-sync occurred. One of the kids was accidentally elbowed, as several kids had been throughout the game. Seemingly hurt, the boy paused the game and covered his face with his hands, perhaps in tears, perhaps not. All at once, a frantic mother rapidly emerged from the bleachers rushing the court, armed with sweaters and Gatorade. She turned reassuringly to the crowd of stunned parents and in a grand gesture, swept her son into her arms. At this, the young boy shook away in surprise. He immediately pulled himself together, and his face quickly went from grimacing in pain to flushing in humiliation.<p>As parents, we all have that innate desire to protect and provide for our kids. Yet, at some point we must ask ourselves, are we doing too much for them? When do our actions cross the line from offering security and support to embarrassing them in front of their entire basketball team? The mis-attunement in this particular mother’s actions was clear in everything from her lack of pause to the odd choice of items she brought to soothe her son, whose minor injury doubtfully rendered him either thirsty or cold. However, we are all guilty of mild and extreme acts of over-protectiveness and over-parenting that can be very damaging to a developing child.</p><p>When we assume our children need more than they do, we are undermining their abilities and hurting their confidence. I first noticed this when I took my 4-year-old daughter to a dance class. When we got there, she happily changed into her outfit and removed her shoes, then asked me to put her hair in a ponytail before she trotted off to class. Moments later a classmate of hers arrived in a stroller, hugging a blanket, and sucking a pacifier. Her father helped her out of her seat, removed her shoes, assured her that her very own personal bag of snacks would be there if she got hungry, and she trotted off to class. That day, my daughter stumbled through the new steps taught in her class, while the other girl spun through the class with the grace and skill of a pro. When she returned to her father, she cried and complained for her pacifier and her snacks.</p><p>The scene reminded me that, as parents, we often fail to recognize how capable our children are. Little acts like pushing them in a stroller instead of letting them walk or giving them a snack before they even feel hunger teaches them to believe they need more looking after than they actually do. Society’s recent pro-parenting shift has its positives. Children are people, and they deserve to have a voice within their home. Parents should always aim to treat their kids with respect, interest, and consideration. However, the trend of helicopter parenting has been taken to extremes and, in that, we are also witnessing pro-parenting’s negative effects.</p><p>A 2011 PEW Research survey further found that “40% of 18- to 24-year-olds currently live with their parents, and the vast majority of them say they did not move back home because of economic conditions.” Young adults who move out then back in with their parents, whether for financial reasons or not, have led people to refer to them as the Boomerang Generation. Though reasons for this are in part economical and societal, I personally believe there is value in investigating how the raising of our children might play some part in their lack of independence in adulthood.</p><p>Many parents are willing to overextend themselves in catering to their children and excessively meeting their needs. They then feel surprised or resentful when their children grow up feeling unable to care for themselves. Doing too much for our kids teaches them to be dependent. Growing up, by its very nature, is a series of weaning experiences for children. From the moment a child is born, they are weaned from the comfort and safety of their mother’s womb. Learning the lessons of how to get their needs met then transitioning to meeting their own needs is not only essential to a person’s survival but to their psychological well-being.</p><p>Similarly, many parents tend to offer kids praise as a means of boosting their confidence. While acknowledging our children’s positive traits is healthy and beneficial to their development, offering them empty praise can be just the opposite. A study showed that kids who were rewarded or complimented for menial or unfitting attributes saw no benefit from the praise. Conversely, acclaim offered to kids for real characteristics did have a positive effect on their self-esteem.</p><p>Unsubstantiated appraisals only leave kids feeling the pressure that they need to be great all the time to live up to the buildup instead of feeling like they are okay just being who they actually are. We can help our children get a real feeling for themselves by offering them real love and affection, while equipping them with skills that help them feel competent.</p><p>A helpful way to look at this is to imagine taking your kids to the park. How much do you let them explore and play independently from you? How much do you interfere and direct their behavior? Are you overly cautious about their safety? Do you discourage them from venturing out on their own? Are you over-attentive to their fears or encouraging of their resilience?</p><p>The park example provides a good metaphor for how we raise our children. A parent should be a secure base from which a child can explore the world. At the park, we can let them be independent while always letting them know that we are there to help, support, and guide them in their own unique adventure. We can be standing by when they need us, and we can step aside when they do not. In doing so, we should allow our children to experience the world for themselves.</p><p>Often, the reasons it is difficult for us to let our kids explore and develop their autonomy has more to do with us than with our children. As parents, it is invaluable to be aware of when we are using our children to fulfill our own needs. How much does our desire to protect them come from them? And how much does it come from our own need to act a protector? How often are the hugs we give them to provide affection, and how often are they to take affection from them?</p><p>So much of parenting involves how we feel about ourselves. As psychologist and author Pat Love has said, the best thing adults can do as parents is to have their needs met by other adults and not by their children. Our kids need us to be the best, most developed, and most fulfilled versions of ourselves in all areas of our lives in order to feel independent and secure in theirs. That way, they can emulate and learn from us without feeling they must fill the voids we experience in our own lives.</p><p>When we give our kids too much power, we start to act like victims to our children instead of the teachers, caregivers, and role models we should be. Overindulging, over-rewarding, or babying our children actually serves as a sort of pressure for greatness and a set up for disappointment. The empty acts we mistake for nurturance are at best substitutes for real love and at worst forms of actual abuse. It’s no great coincidence that many of the children we see being spoiled or indulged also appear unhappy and dissatisfied. The most honest proof of good parenting is seeing our child doing well, showing interest, learning skills, finding contentment, and finding him/herself. What we can offer as parents is love, safety, support, and guidance, a strong security from which our children can confidently venture out and independently experience the world.</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-59836433040726948952012-08-26T14:19:00.001-04:002012-08-26T14:19:38.455-04:00An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism | NYT Opinion MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF<div class='posterous_autopost'>OPINION<p>By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF<br />Published: August 25, 2012</p><p>IN recent years, scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the causes of autism, now estimated to afflict 1 in 88 children. But remarkably little of this understanding has percolated into popular awareness, which often remains fixated on vaccines.<p /> Eleanor Davis<br />So here’s the short of it: At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease. And it begins in the womb.</p><p>It starts with what scientists call immune dysregulation. Ideally, your immune system should operate like an enlightened action hero, meting out inflammation precisely, accurately and with deadly force when necessary, but then quickly returning to a Zen-like calm. Doing so requires an optimal balance of pro- and anti-inflammatory muscle.</p><p>In autistic individuals, the immune system fails at this balancing act. Inflammatory signals dominate. Anti-inflammatory ones are inadequate. A state of chronic activation prevails. And the more skewed toward inflammation, the more acute the autistic symptoms.</p><p>Nowhere are the consequences of this dysregulation more evident than in the autistic brain. Spidery cells that help maintain neurons — called astroglia and microglia — are enlarged from chronic activation. Pro-inflammatory signaling molecules abound. Genes involved in inflammation are switched on.</p><p>These findings are important for many reasons, but perhaps the most noteworthy is that they provide evidence of an abnormal, continuing biological process. That means that there is finally a therapeutic target for a disorder defined by behavioral criteria like social impairments, difficulty communicating and repetitive behaviors.</p><p>But how to address it, and where to begin? That question has led scientists to the womb. A population-wide study from Denmark spanning two decades of births indicates that infection during pregnancy increases the risk of autism in the child. Hospitalization for a viral infection, like the flu, during the first trimester of pregnancy triples the odds. Bacterial infection, including of the urinary tract, during the second trimester increases chances by 40 percent.</p><p>The lesson here isn’t necessarily that viruses and bacteria directly damage the fetus. Rather, the mother’s attempt to repel invaders — her inflammatory response — seems at fault. Research by Paul Patterson, an expert in neuroimmunity at Caltech, demonstrates this important principle. Inflaming pregnant mice artificially — without a living infective agent — prompts behavioral problems in the young. In this model, autism results from collateral damage. It’s an unintended consequence of self-defense during pregnancy.</p><p>Yet to blame infections for the autism epidemic is folly. First, in the broadest sense, the epidemiology doesn’t jibe. Leo Kanner first described infantile autism in 1943. Diagnoses have increased tenfold, although a careful assessment suggests that the true increase in incidences is less than half that. But in that same period, viral and bacterial infections have generally declined. By many measures, we’re more infection-free than ever before in human history.</p><p>Better clues to the causes of the autism phenomenon come from parallel “epidemics.” The prevalence of inflammatory diseases in general has increased significantly in the past 60 years. As a group, they include asthma, now estimated to affect 1 in 10 children — at least double the prevalence of 1980 — and autoimmune disorders, which afflict 1 in 20.</p><p>Both are linked to autism, especially in the mother. One large Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent. Genetic studies tell a similar tale. Gene variants associated with autoimmune disease — genes of the immune system — also increase the risk of autism, especially when they occur in the mother.</p><p>In some cases, scientists even see a misguided immune response in action. Mothers of autistic children often have unique antibodies that bind to fetal brain proteins. A few years back, scientists at the MIND Institute, a research center for neurodevelopmental disorders at the University of California, Davis, injected these antibodies into pregnant macaques. (Control animals got antibodies from mothers of typical children.) Animals whose mothers received “autistic” antibodies displayed repetitive behavior. They had trouble socializing with others in the troop. In this model, autism results from an attack on the developing fetus.</p><p>But there are still other paths to the disorder. A mother’s diagnosis of asthma or allergies during the second trimester of pregnancy increases her child’s risk of autism.</p><p>So does metabolic syndrome, a disorder associated with insulin resistance, obesity and, crucially, low-grade inflammation. The theme here is maternal immune dysregulation. Earlier this year, scientists presented direct evidence of this prenatal imbalance. Amniotic fluid collected from Danish newborns who later developed autism looked mildly inflamed.</p><p>Debate swirls around the reality of the autism phenomenon, and rightly so. Diagnostic criteria have changed repeatedly, and awareness has increased. How much — if any — of the “autism epidemic” is real, how much artifact?</p><p>YET when you consider that, as a whole, diseases of immune dysregulation have increased in the past 60 years — and that these disorders are linked to autism — the question seems a little moot. The better question is: Why are we so prone to inflammatory disorders? What has happened to the modern immune system?</p><p>There’s a good evolutionary answer to that query, it turns out. Scientists have repeatedly observed that people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as we do.</p><p>Generally speaking, autism also follows this pattern. It seems to be less prevalent in the developing world. Usually, epidemiologists fault lack of diagnosis for the apparent absence. A dearth of expertise in the disorder, the argument goes, gives a false impression of scarcity. Yet at least one Western doctor who specializes in autism has explicitly noted that, in a Cambodian population rife with parasites and acute infections, autism was nearly nonexistent.</p><p>For autoimmune and allergic diseases linked to autism, meanwhile, the evidence is compelling. In environments that resemble the world of yore, the immune system is much less prone to diseases of dysregulation.</p><p>Generally, the scientists working on autism and inflammation aren’t aware of this — or if they are, they don’t let on. But Kevin Becker, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, has pointed out that asthma and autism follow similar epidemiological patterns. They’re both more common in urban areas than rural; firstborns seem to be at greater risk; they disproportionately afflict young boys.</p><p>In the context of allergic disease, the hygiene hypothesis — that we suffer from microbial deprivation — has long been invoked to explain these patterns. Dr. Becker argues that it should apply to autism as well. (Why the male bias? Male fetuses, it turns out, are more sensitive to Mom’s inflammation than females.)</p><p>More recently, William Parker at Duke University has chimed in. He’s not, by training, an autism expert. But his work focuses on the immune system and its role in biology and disease, so he’s particularly qualified to point out the following: the immune system we consider normal is actually an evolutionary aberration.</p><p>Some years back, he began comparing wild sewer rats with clean lab rats. They were, in his words, “completely different organisms.” Wild rats tightly controlled inflammation. Not so the lab rats. Why? The wild rodents were rife with parasites. Parasites are famous for limiting inflammation.</p><p>Humans also evolved with plenty of parasites. Dr. Parker and many others think that we’re biologically dependent on the immune suppression provided by these hangers-on and that their removal has left us prone to inflammation. “We were willing to put up with hay fever, even some autoimmune disease,” he told me recently. “But autism? That’s it! You’ve got to stop this insanity.”</p><p>What does stopping the insanity entail? Fix the maternal dysregulation, and you’ve most likely prevented autism. That’s the lesson from rodent experiments. In one, Swiss scientists created a lineage of mice with a genetically reinforced anti-inflammatory signal. Then the scientists inflamed the pregnant mice. The babies emerged fine — no behavioral problems. The take-away: Control inflammation during pregnancy, and it won’t interfere with fetal brain development.</p><p>For people, a drug that’s safe for use during pregnancy may help. A probiotic, many of which have anti-inflammatory properties, may also be of benefit. Not coincidentally, asthma researchers are arriving at similar conclusions; prevention of the lung disease will begin with the pregnant woman. Dr. Parker has more radical ideas: pre-emptive restoration of “domesticated” parasites in everybody — worms developed solely for the purpose of correcting the wayward, postmodern immune system.</p><p>Practically speaking, this seems beyond improbable. And yet, a trial is under way at the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine testing a medicalized parasite called Trichuris suis in autistic adults.</p><p>First used medically to treat inflammatory bowel disease, the whipworm, which is native to pigs, has anecdotally shown benefit in autistic children.</p><p>And really, if you spend enough time wading through the science, Dr. Parker’s idea — an ecosystem restoration project, essentially — not only fails to seem outrageous, but also seems inevitable.</p><p>Since time immemorial, a very specific community of organisms — microbes, parasites, some viruses — has aggregated to form the human superorganism. Mounds of evidence suggest that our immune system anticipates these inputs and that, when they go missing, the organism comes unhinged.</p><p>Future doctors will need to correct the postmodern tendency toward immune dysregulation. Evolution has provided us with a road map: the original accretion pattern of the superorganism. Preventive medicine will need, by strange necessity, to emulate the patterns from deep in our past.</p><p>Moises Velasquez-Manoff is the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.”</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-77445605007200482542012-07-22T21:33:00.003-04:002012-07-22T21:33:54.876-04:00Popular Basis of Political Authority | The Founders' Constitution<div class='posterous_autopost'>[Volume 1, Page 68]<p>CHAPTER 2 | Document 23</p><p>Thomas Jefferson to James Madison</p><p>6 Sept. 1789 Papers 15:392--97</p><p>I sit down to write to you without knowing by what occasion I shall send my letter. I do it because a subject comes into my head which I would wish to develope a little more than is practicable in the hurry of the moment of making up general dispatches.</p><p>The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind; and that no such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof.--I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living : that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society. If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of it's lands in severality, it will be taken by the first occupants. These will generally be the wife and children of the decedent. If they have formed rules of appropriation, those rules may give it to the wife and children, or to some one of them, or to the legatee of the deceased. So they may give it to his creditor. But the child, the legatee, or creditor takes it, not by any natural right, but by a law of the society of which they are members, and to which they are subject. Then no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which would be the reverse of our principle.</p><p>What is true of every member of the society individually, is true of them all collectively, since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.--To keep our ideas clear when applying them to a multitude, let us suppose a whole generation of men to be born on the same day, to attain mature age on the same day, and to die on the same day, leaving a succeeding generation in the moment of attaining their mature age all together. Let the ripe age be supposed of 21. years, and their period of life 34. years more, that being the average term given by the bills of mortality to persons who have already attained 21. years of age. Each successive generation would, in this way, come on, and go off the stage at a fixed moment, as individuals do now. Then I say the earth belongs to each of these generations, during it's course, fully, and in their own right. The 2d. generation receives it clear of the debts and incumberances of the 1st. the 3d of the 2d. and so on. For if the 1st. could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not the living generation. Then no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of it's own existence. At 21. years of age they may bind themselves and their lands for 34. years to come: at 22. for 33: at 23. for 32. and at 54. for one year only; because these are the terms of life which remain to them at those respective epochs.--But a material difference must be noted between the succession of an individual, and that of a whole generation. Individuals are parts only of a society, subject to the laws of the whole. These laws may appropriate the portion of land occupied by a decedent to his creditor rather than to any other, or to his child on condition he satisfies the creditor. But when a whole generation, that is, the whole society dies, as in the case we have supposed, and another generation or society succeeds, this forms a whole, and there is no superior who can give their territory to a third society, who may have lent money to their predecessors beyond their faculties of paying.</p><p>What is true of a generation all arriving to self-government on the same day, and dying all on the same day, is true of those in a constant course of decay and renewal, with this only difference. A generation coming in and going out entire, as in the first case, would have a right in the 1st. year of their self-dominion to contract a debt for 33. years, in the 10th. for 24. in the 20th. for 14. in the 30th. for 4. whereas generations, changing daily by daily deaths and births, have one constant term, beginning at the date of their contract, and ending when a majority of those of full age at that date shall be dead. The length of that term may be estimated from the tables of mortality, corrected by the circumstances of climate, occupation &c. peculiar to the country of the contractors. Take, for instance, the table of M. de Buffon wherein he states 23,994 deaths, and the ages at which they happened. Suppose a society in which 23,994 persons are born every year, and live to the ages stated in this table. The conditions of that society will be as follows. 1st. It will consist constantly of 617,703. persons of all ages. 21y. Of those living at any one [Volume 1, Page 69] instant of time, one half will be dead in 24. years 8. months. 3dly. 1[8],675 will arrive every year at the age of 21. years complete. 41y. It will constantly have 348,417 persons of all ages above 21. years. 5ly. And the half of those of 21. years and upwards living at any one instant of time will be dead in 18. years 8. months, or say 19. years as the nearest integral number. Then 19. years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation, nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly extend a debt.</p><p>To render this conclusion palpable by example, suppose that Louis XIV. and XV. had contracted debts in the name of the French nation to the amount of 10,000 milliards of livres, and that the whole had been contracted in Genoa. The interest of this sum would be 500. milliards, which is said to be the whole rent roll or nett proceeds of the territory of France. Must the present generation of men have retired from the territory in which nature produced them, and ceded it to the Genoese creditors? No. They have the same rights over the soil on which they were produced, as the preceding generations had. They derive these rights not from their predecessors, but from nature. They then and their soil are by nature clear of the debts of their predecessors.</p><p>Again suppose Louis XV. and his cotemporary generation had said to the money-lenders of Genoa, give us money that we may eat, drink, and be merry in our day; and on condition you will demand no interest till the end of 19. years you shall then for ever after receive an annual interest of 125/8 per cent. The money is lent on these conditions, is divided among the living, eaten, drank, and squandered. Would the present generation be obliged to apply the produce of the earth and of their labour to replace their dissipations? Not at all.</p><p>I suppose that the recieved opinion, that the public debts of one generation devolve on the next, has been suggested by our seeing habitually in private life that he who succeeds to lands is required to pay the debts of his ancestor or testator: without considering that this requisition is municipal only, not moral; flowing from the will of the society, which has found it convenient to appropriate lands, become vacant by the death of their occupant, on the condition of a paiment of his debts: but that between society and society, or generation and generation, there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have percieved that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.</p><p>The interest of the national debt of France being in fact but a two thousandth part of it's rent roll, the paiment of it is practicable enough: and so becomes a question merely of honor, or of expediency. But with respect to future debts, would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare, in the constitution they are forming, that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself, can validly contract more debt than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19. years? And that all future contracts will be deemed void as to what shall remain unpaid at the end of 19. years from their date? This would put the lenders, and the borrowers also, on their guard. By reducing too the faculty of borrowing within it's natural limits, it would bridle the spirit of war, to which too free a course has been procured by the inattention of money-lenders to this law of nature, that succeeding generations are not responsible for the preceding.</p><p>On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.--It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law has been expressly limited to 19 years only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might be indeed if every form of government were so perfectly contrived that the will of the majority could always be obtained fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot assemble themselves. Their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils. Bribery corrupts them. Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents: and other impediments arise so as to prove to every practical man that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal.</p><p>This principle that the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive application and consequences, in every country, and most especially in France. It enters into the resolution of the questions Whether the nation may change the descent of lands holden in tail? Whether they may change the appropriation of lands given antiently to the church, to hospitals, colleges, orders of chivalry, and otherwise in perpetuity? Whether they may abolish the charges and privileges attached on lands, including the whole catalogue ecclesiastical and feudal? It goes to hereditary offices, authorities and jurisdictions; to hereditary orders, distinctions and appellations; to perpetual monopolies in commerce, the arts and sciences; with a long train of et ceteras: and it renders the question of reimbursement a question of generosity and not of right. In all these cases, the legislature of the day could authorize such appropriations and establishments for their own time, but no longer; and the present holders, even where they, or their ancestors, have purchased, are in the case of bonâ fide purchasers of what the seller had no right to convey.</p><p>Turn this subject in your mind, my dear Sir, and particularly as to the power of contracting debts; and develope it with that perspicuity and cogent logic so peculiarly yours. Your station in the councils of our country gives [Volume 1, Page 70] you an opportunity of producing it to public consideration, of forcing it into discussion. At first blush it may be rallied, as a theoretical speculation: but examination will prove it to be solid and salutary. It would furnish matter for a fine preamble to our first law for appropriating the public revenue; and it will exclude at the threshold of our new government the contagious and ruinous errors of this quarter of the globe, which have armed despots with means, not sanctioned by nature, for binding in chains their fellow men. We have already given in example one effectual check to the Dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to pay. I should be pleased to see this second obstacle held out by us also in the first instance. No nation can make a declaration against the validity of long-contracted debts so disinterestedly as we, since we do not owe a shilling which may not be paid with ease, principal and interest, within the time of our own lives.--Establish the principle also in the new law to be passed for protecting copyrights and new inventions, by securing the exclusive right for 19. instead of 14. years. Besides familiarising us to this term, it will be an instance the more of our taking reason for our guide, instead of English precedent, the habit of which fetters us with all the political heresies of a nation equally remarkeable for it's early excitement from some errors, and long slumbering under others.</p><p>The Founders' Constitution Volume 1, Chapter 2, Document 23 <a href="http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s23.html">http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s23.html</a> The University of Chicago Press</p><p>The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Julian P. Boyd et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950--.</p><p>© 1987 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2000 <a href="http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/">http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/</a></p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-6099536766300396882012-07-22T21:33:00.001-04:002012-07-22T21:33:33.307-04:00To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It | Philip K. Howard| theatlantic.com<div class='posterous_autopost'>Successful schools don't have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.<p>America's schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower.</p><p>Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies -- nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don't emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students -- with spontaneity, authority, and wit.</p><p>Good teachers typically are found in schools with good cultures. Experts say you can tell if a school is effective within five minutes of walking in. Students are orderly and respectful when changing classes; there's a steady hum of activity. Good school culture typically grows out of good leadership. Here as well, there are many variations of success. KIPP schools have a formula that includes, for students, longer hours and strict accountability to core values, and, for teachers, a cooperative role in developing school activities and pedagogy. David Brooks recently described a highly successful school in Brooklyn that abandons the teacher-in-front-of-class model in favor of collaborative learning. Students sit around larger tables trying to solve problems or discuss the task at hand. In every successful school, whatever its theory of education, a good culture sweeps everyone along, as if by a strong tide, towards common goals of discovery and learning.</p><p>Successful teaching and good school cultures don't have a formula, but they have a necessary condition: teachers and principals must feel free to act on their best instincts. Minute by minute, as they respond to students and each other, their focus must be on doing what's right. Humans can only focus on one thing at a time, sociologist Robert Merton observed. That's why it's vital for teachers to be thinking only about how to communicate the lesson to the students in front of them. Any diversion of this focus is apt to be seen as indifference or boredom, and will break the magic.</p><p>This is why we must bulldoze school bureaucracy. It is a giant diversion, focused on compliance to please some administrator far away. Every minute spent filling out a form or worrying about compliance interferes with the human interaction that is the essence of effective teaching.</p><p>Law is everywhere in schools. It permeates every nook and cranny. Teachers spend hours every week filling out forms that no one ever reads -- because the laws and regulations that have piled up over the years require them. Hardly any interaction is free of legal implications. Teachers are instructed never -- never ever -- to put an arm around a crying child: the school might get sued. Misbehavior and disrespect are met with weakness and resignation; teachers are trained to be stoics, tolerating disorder rather than running the risk of a due process hearing in which the teacher, not the student, must justify her decision. Principals suffer a similar inversion of authority with teachers, who are armed with hundreds of pages of work rules that prescribe exactly what teachers can be asked to do. Managing a school -- say, setting the hours, deciding how to spend the budget, and deciding which teachers are doing the job --is an oxymoron. Public schools today are, by law, basically unmanageable.</p><p>Throw onto the legal pile a mono-minded compulsion -- complete with legal penalties -- to satisfy minimum standardized test scores. Recess has been canceled, arts and humanities courses scrapped, and creative interaction replaced by rote drills -- largely because of one law, known as No Child Left Behind. Another unintended effect of focusing only on the lowest performers is that all the all the other students get left behind. Teachers are treated like machine tools, their personalities and passions extruded through rigid drilling protocols. Demoralization has never been considered a good management strategy, but that's what NCLB has accomplished. One teacher in Florida put it this way: I love teaching, I love kids, but it's become harder and harder when you're teaching to the test. Can you hear the discouragement in my voice? </p><p>America's schools face many external challenges, particularly the breakdown of the nuclear family and an imbedded underclass. But numerous public, charter, and parochial schools succeed notwithstanding these challenges. What all these successful schools have in common is that somehow, usually with strong leadership, they figure out how to repress the bureaucracy and unleash the human spirit. We have a great deal of freedom here, observed a teacher at a successful school studied by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, because the principal protects his faculty from 'the arbitrary regulations of the central authority.' </p><p>The organizational flaw in America's schools is that they are too organized. Bureaucracy can't teach. American schools have been organized on the totally erroneous assumption, management expert Peter Drucker observed, that there is one right way to learn and it is the same for everyone. We must give educators freedom to be themselves. This doesn't mean they should be unaccountable. But they should be accountable for overall success, including, especially, success at socialization of students through a healthy school culture, not just objective test scores. This requires scrapping the current system -- all of it, federal, state, and local, as well as union contracts. We must start over and rebuild an open framework in which real people can find inspiration in doing things their own way.</p><p>This article available online at:</p><p><a href="http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/to-fix-americas-education-bureaucracy-we-need-to-destroy-it/255173/">http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/to-fix-americas-education-b...</a></p><p>Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-29724464036620938992012-07-08T00:20:00.001-04:002012-07-08T00:20:11.206-04:00Climate mythology: The Gulf Stream, European climate and Abrupt Change<div class='posterous_autopost'>Climate mythology: The Gulf Stream, European climate and Abrupt Change Richard Seager Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University<p>A few times a year the British media of all stripes goes into a tizzy of panic when one climate scientist or another states that there is a possibility that the North Atlantic ocean circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is a major part, will slow down in coming years or even stop. Whether the scientists statements are measured or inflammatory the media invariably warns that this will plunge Britain and Europe into a new ice age, pictures of the icy shores of Labrador are shown, created film of English Channel ferries making their way through sea ice are broadcast... And so the circus continues year after year. Here is one example.</p><p>The Gulf Stream-European climate myth The panic is based on a long held belief of the British, other Europeans, Americans and, indeed, much of the world's population that the northward heat transport by the Gulf Stream is the reason why western Europe enjoys a mild climate, much milder than, say, that of eastern North America. This idea was actually originated by an American military man, Matthew Fontaine Maury, in the mid nineteenth century and has stuck since despite the absence of proof.</p><p>We now know this is a myth, the climatological equivalent of an urban legend. In a detailed study published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2002, we demonstrated the limited role that ocean heat transport plays in determining regional climates around the Atlantic Ocean. Popular versions of this story can be found here, here and, in French, here.</p><p>The determinants of North Atlantic regional climates We showed that there are three processes that need to be evaluated:</p><p>1. The ocean absorbs heat in summer and releases it in winter. Regions that are downwind of oceans in winter will have mild climates. This process does not require ocean currents or ocean heat transport. 2. The atmosphere moves heat poleward and warm climates where the heat converges. In additions, the waviness in the atmospheric flow creates warm climates where the air flows poleward and cold climates where it flows equatorward. 3. The ocean moves heat poleward and will warm climates where it releases heat and the atmosphere picks it up and moves it onto land.</p><p>Using observations and climate models we found that, at the latitudes of Europe, the atmospheric heat transport exceeds that of the ocean by several fold. In winter it may even by an order of magnitude greater. Thus it is the atmosphere, not the ocean, that does the lion's share of the work ameliorating winter climates in the extratropics. We also found that the seasonal absorption and release of heat by the ocean has a much larger impact on regional climates than does the movement of heat by ocean currents.</p><p>Seasonal storage and release accounts for half the winter temperature difference across the North Atlantic Ocean. But the 500 pound gorilla in how regional climates are determined around the Atlantic turned out to be the Rocky Mountains. Because of the need to conserve angular momentum, as air flows from the west across the mountains it is forced to first turn south and then to turn north further downstream. As such the mountains force cold air south into eastern North America and warm air north into western Europe. This waviness in the flow is responsible for the other half of the temperature difference across the North Atlantic Ocean.</p><p>Hence:</p><p>1. Fifty percent of the winter temperature difference across the North Atlantic is caused by the eastward atmospheric transport of heat released by the ocean that was absorbed and stored in the summer. 2. Fifty percent is caused by the stationary waves of the atmospheric flow. 3. The ocean heat transport contributes a small warming across the basin.</p><p>The seasonal ocean heat storage and pattern of atmospheric heat transport add up to make winters in western Europe 15 to 20 degrees C warmer than those in eastern North America. A very similar process occurs across the Pacific Ocean. The ocean heat transport warms the North Atlantic Ocean and the land on both sides by a modest few degrees C. The only place where the ocean heat transport fundamentally alters climate is along the coast of northern Norway which would be sea ice-covered were it not for the warm northward flowing Norwegian Current.</p><p>The Gulf Stream and future climate change A slowdown of the Gulf Stream and ocean circulation in the future, induced by freshening of the waters caused by anthropogenic climate change (via melting glaciers and increased water vapor transport into high latitudes) or simply by warming, would thus introduce a modest cooling tendency. This would leave the temperature contrast across the Atlantic unchanged and not plunge Europe back into the ice age or anything like it. In fact the cooling tendency would probably be overwhelmed by the direct radiatively-driven warming by rising greenhouse gases.</p><p>North Atlantic Ocean circulation and abrupt climate change The conflation of the Gulf Stream, ocean heat transport and Europe's climate has led to changes in ocean circulation being the reigning theory of the cause of glacial era abrupt climate change. These abrupt changes - the Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last ice age and the Younger Dryas cold reversal of the last deglaciation - are well recorded in the Greenland ice core and Europe and involved changes in winter temperature of as much as thirty degrees C! For the Younger Dryas it has been proposed that the sudden release of glacial meltwater from ice dammed Lake Agassiz freshened the North Atlantic and shut down the overturning circulation causing dramatic regional coooling.</p><p>Only through an inflated view of the impact of ocean circulation could it be thought that the enormous glacial era abrupt changes were caused by changes in ocean circulation. Instead, as we have argued, changes in atmospheric circulation regimes had to be the driver, see (Seager and Battisti,2007). Determining how this could happen has become more of a priority now that the geological evidence for the Lake Agassiz flood has not been found, see (Broecker,2006).</p><p>Moving beyond the myth It is long time that the Gulf Stream-European climate myth was resigned to the graveyard of defunct misconceptions along with the Earth being flat and the sun going around the Earth. In its place we need serious assessments of how changes in ocean circulation will impact climate change and a new look at the problem of abrupt climate change that gives the tropical climate system and the atmosphere their due as the primary drivers of regional climates around the world.</p><p>Publications</p><p>Seager, R., D. S. Battisti, J. Yin, N. Gordon, N. H. Naik, A. C. Clement and M. A. Cane, 2002: Is the Gulf Stream responsible for Europe's mild winters? Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 128(586): 2563-2586. PDF Seager, R. and D. S. Battisti, 2007: Challenges to our understanding of the general circulation: abrupt climate change. In: T. Schneider and A.S. Sobel (Editors), The Global Circulation of the Atmosphere: Phenomena, Theory, Challenges. Princeton University Press, pp. 331-371. PDF. Seager, R., 2006: The source of Europe's mild climate. American Scientist, 94(4): 334-341. PDF. Seager, R., 2008: Setting the record straight on Europe's mild winters. The Plantsman, Royal Horticultural Society,7, Part 1 March, p.22-27. PDF. Seager, R., 2003: Gulf Stream la fin d'un mythe. La Recherche(361): 40-46.PDF</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-82195731850250168512012-07-08T00:17:00.001-04:002012-07-08T00:17:05.565-04:00The American Heat Wave and Global Warming | scietopia Blog<div class='posterous_autopost'>Global warming is a big issue. If we're honest and we look carefully at the data, it's beyond question that the atmosphere of our planet is warming. It's also beyond any honest question that the preponderance of the evidence is that human behavior is the primary cause. It's not impossible that we're wrong - but when we look at the real evidence, it's overwhelming.<p>Of course, this doesn't stop people from being idiots.</p><p>But what I'm going to focus on here isn't exactly the usual idiots. See, here in the US, we're in the middle of a dramatic heat wave. All over the country, we've been breaking heat daily temperature records. As I write this, it's 98 degrees outside here in NY, and we're expecting another couple of degrees. Out in the west, there are gigantic wildfires, cause by poor snowfall last winter, poor rainfall this spring, and record heat to dry everything out. So: is this global warming?</p><p>We're seeing lots and lots of people saying yes. Or worse, saying that it is, because of the heat wave, while pretending that they're not really saying that it is. For one, among all-too-many examples, you can look at Bad Astronomy here. Not to rag too much on Phil though, because hes just one among about two dozen different example of this that I've seen in the last 3 days.</p><p>Weather 10 or twenty degree above normal isn't global warming. A heat wave, even a massive epic heat wave, isn't proof that global warming is real, any more than an epic cold wave or blizzard is evidence that global warming is fake.</p><p>I'm sure you've heard many people say weather is not climate. But for human beings, it's really hard to understand just what that really means. Climate is a world-wide long-term average; weather is instantaneous and local. This isn't just a nitpick: it's a huge distinction. When we talk about global warming, what we're talking about is the year-round average temperature changing by one or two degrees. A ten degree variation in local weather doesn't tell us anything about the worldwide trend.</p><p>Global warming is about climate. And part of what that means is that in some places, global warming will probably make the weather colder. Cold weather isn't evidence against global warming. Most people realize that - which is why we all laugh when gasbags like Rush Limbaugh talk about how a snowstorm proves that global warming is a fraud. But at the same time, we look at weather like what we have in the US, and conclude that Yes, global warming is real . But we're making the same mistake.</p><p>Global warming is about a surprisingly small change. Over the last hundred years, global warming is a change of about 1 degree Celsius in the global average temperature. That's about 1 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit, for us Americans. It seems miniscule, and it's a tiny fraction of the temperature difference that we're seeing this summer in the US.</p><p>But that tiny difference in climate can cause huge differences in weather. As I mentioned before, it can make local weather either warmer or colder - not just by directly warming the air, but by altering wind and water currents in ways that create dramatic changes.</p><p>For example, global warming could, likely, make Europe significantly colder. How? The weather in western Europe is greatly affected by an ocean water current called the atlantic conveyor. The conveyor is a cyclic ocean current, where (driven in part by the jet stream), warm water flows north from the equator in a surface current, cooling as it goes, until it finally sinks and starts to cycle back south in a deep underwater current. This acts as a heat pump, moving energy from the equator north and east to western Europe. This is why Western Europe is significantly warmer than places at the same latitude in Eastern North America.</p><p>Global warming could alter the flow of the Atlantic conveyor. (We don't know if it will - but it's one possibility, which makes a good example of something counter-intuitive.) If the conveyor is slowed, so that it transfers less energy, Europe will get colder. How could the conveyor be slowed? By ice-melt. The conveyor works as a cycle because of the differences in density between warm and cold water: cold water is denser than warm water, so the cold water sinks as it cools. It warms in the tropics, gets pushed north by the jet stream, cools along the way and gradually sinks.</p><p>But global warming is melting a lot of Arctic and glacier ice, which produces freshwater. Freshwater is less dense than saltwater. So the freshwater, when it dilutes the cold water at the northern end of the conveyor, it reduces its density relative to the pure salt-water - and that reduces the tendency of the cold water to sink, which could slow the conveyor.</p><p>There are numerous similar phenomena that involve changes in ocean currents and wind due to relatively small temperature variations. El Nino and La Nina, conveyor changes, changes in the moisture-carrying capacity of wind currents to carry - they're all caused by relatively small changes - changes well with the couple of degrees of variation that we see occurring.</p><p>But we need to be honest and careful. This summer may be incredibly hot, and we had an unusually warm winter before it - but we really shouldn't try to use that as evidence of global warming. Because if you do, when some colder-than-normal weather occurs somewhere, the cranks and liars that want to convince people that global warming is an elaborate fraud will use that the muddle things - and when they do, it'll be our fault when people fall for it, because we'll be the ones who primed them for that argument. As nice, as convenient, as convincing as it might seem to draw a correlation between a specific instance of extreme weather and global warming, we really need to stop doing it.</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-46256863596929703642012-07-01T16:02:00.001-04:002012-07-01T16:02:58.760-04:00What Really Makes Us Fat By GARY TAUBES | New York Times<div class='posterous_autopost'>June 30, 2012 <p>A CALORIE is a calorie. This truism has been the foundation of nutritional wisdom and our beliefs about obesity since the 1960s.</p><p>What it means is that a calorie of protein will generate the same energy when metabolized in a living organism as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. When talking about obesity or why we get fat, evoking the phrase “a calorie is a calorie” is almost invariably used to imply that what we eat is relatively unimportant. We get fat because we take in more calories than we expend; we get lean if we do the opposite. Anyone who tells you otherwise, by this logic, is trying to sell you something.</p><p>But not everyone buys this calorie argument, and the dispute erupted in full force again last week. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a clinical trial by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and his collaborators. While the media tended to treat the study as another diet trial — what should we eat to maintain weight loss? — it spoke to a far more fundamental issue: What actually causes obesity? Why do we get fat in the first place? Too many calories? Or something else?</p><p>The calorie-is-a-calorie notion dates to 1878, when the great German nutritionist Max Rubner established what he called the isodynamic law.</p><p>It was applied to obesity in the early 1900s by another German — Carl Von Noorden, who was of two minds on the subject. One of his theories suggested that common obesity was all about calories in minus calories out; another, that it was about how the body partitions those calories, either for energy or into storage.</p><p>This has been the core of the controversy ever since, and it’s never gone away. If obesity is a fuel-partitioning problem — a fat-storage defect — then the trigger becomes not the quantity of food available but the quality. Now carbohydrates in the diet become the prime suspects, especially refined and easily digestible carbohydrates (foods that have what’s called a high glycemic index) and sugars.</p><p>UNTIL the 1960s, carbohydrates were indeed considered a likely suspect in obesity: “Every woman knows that carbohydrate is fattening,” as two British dietitians began a 1963 British Journal of Nutrition article.</p><p>The obvious mechanism: carbohydrates stimulate secretion of the hormone insulin, which works, among other things, to store fat in our fat cells. At the time, though, the conventional wisdom was beginning its shift: obesity was becoming an energy issue.</p><p>Carbohydrates, with less than half the calories per gram as fat, were beginning their official transformation into heart-healthy diet foods. One reason we’ve been told since to eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets is this expectation that they’ll keep us thin.</p><p>What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. First they took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight. Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back. Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same. This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss. The belief is that weight loss causes “metabolic adaptations,” which make it almost inevitable that the weight will return. Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them. But now the subjects were rotated through three very different diets, one month for each. They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of the diets was very different.</p><p>One diet was low-fat and thus high in carbohydrates. This was the diet we’re all advised to eat: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean sources of protein. One diet had a low glycemic index: fewer carbohydrates in total, and those that were included were slow to be digested — from beans, non-starchy vegetables and other minimally processed sources. The third diet was Atkins, which is very low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein.</p><p>The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss. These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. Eight of the 21 subjects expended more than they did at their full weights — the opposite of the predicted metabolic compensation.</p><p>On the very low-carbohydrate diet, Dr. Ludwig’s subjects expended 300 more calories a day than they did on the low-fat diet and 150 calories more than on the low-glycemic-index diet. As Dr. Ludwig explained, when the subjects were eating low-fat diets, they’d have to add an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity each day to expend as much energy as they would effortlessly on the very-low-carb diet. And this while consuming the same amount of calories. If the physical activity made them hungrier — a likely assumption — maintaining weight on the low-fat, high-carb diet would be even harder. Why does this speak to the very cause of obesity? One way to think about this is to consider weight-reduced subjects as “pre-obese.” They’re almost assuredly going to get fatter, and so they can be research stand-ins — perhaps the best we have — for those of us who are merely predisposed to get fat but haven’t done so yet and might take a few years or decades longer to do it.</p><p>If we think of Dr. Ludwig’s subjects as pre-obese, then the study tells us that the nutrient composition of the diet can trigger the predisposition to get fat, independent of the calories consumed. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the more easily we remain lean. The more carbohydrates, the more difficult. In other words, carbohydrates are fattening, and obesity is a fat-storage defect. What matters, then, is the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume and their effect on insulin.</p><p>From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.</p><p>A controversial conclusion? Absolutely, and Dr. Ludwig’s results are by no means ironclad. The diets should be fed for far longer than one month, something he hopes to do in a follow-up study. As in any science, these experiments should be replicated by independent investigators. We’ve been arguing about this for over a century. Let’s put it to rest with more good science. The public health implications are enormous.</p><p>Gary Taubes is The author of “Why We Get Fat.”</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-20014257643231635682012-06-29T20:57:00.001-04:002012-06-29T20:57:44.220-04:00Linux grabs its single biggest win | Jack Wallen TechRepublic<div class='posterous_autopost'>By Jack Wallen June 18, 2012, 7:48 AM PDT<p>Takeaway: The U.S. Navy and Dept. of Defense have learned valuable lessons that translate to huge contracts for the Linux OS. What does this mean for open source and the community that drives it? Jack Wallen offers his take.</p><p>Northrop Grumman Transformational Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle system. Ever hear of it? It’s a U.S. Navy drone, otherwise known as the MQ-8B Fire Scout. Why is it significant? Because recently the Navy decided to drop the Windows operating system that was running in favor of Linux. And just why did they drop the previous operating system?</p><p>A virus.</p><p>That’s right…previously a virus had infected the operating system on the U.S. Air Force’s drone control system.</p><p>A virus…on the system controlling drones. Think about it. Imagine the consequences of a drone or fighter plane suffering from a computer virus — while armed! That was a significant enough “oops” to lead the U.S. Navy to migrate their drone systems from Windows to Linux.</p><p>When I read this, I was shocked. First and foremost, I couldn’t believe such planes were controlled by anything powered with any flavor of the Windows operating system — not when the U.S. Navy has enough intelligence and resources to even create their own OS. Once that shock flushed from my system, I had to wonder…who would be the one to run Combofix on the systems running those drones? What a horrible job that would be…having to take the fall for an infected computer system on a military aircraft.</p><p>Anyway…I digress.</p><p>The decision brings a 28 million dollar contract to the Linux community (who, exactly, will be getting this contract is unknown), but that is not all. Based on this (and other issues) with non-free software, the U.S. Department of Defense is laying out guidelines on how its agencies can use open source code. And even though the DOD’s use of open source code will alter the GPL for said code (they can’t, for obvious reasons, release any code they use and modify back into the wild), this is a huge deal for open source everywhere.</p><p>Think about it. The DOD has decided that open source is a more secure and reliable route than proprietary systems. That trickle down is going to have a serious, lasting effect in the world of Linux. Here’s how I see this working:</p><p>DOD begins Linux roll out US Government begins wide-spread roll out Civilian security companies world-wide begin roll out Universities fall in line Consumers begin clamoring for better security on their OS</p><p>Although this could seem like a pipe dream (for this to rain down upon the consumers), if the masses really want to start getting serious about their security (and they should), this should be a lesson from up high that should not be taken lightly.</p><p>Windows is a good desktop operating system — but one with many, serious security flaws. And although Microsoft is doing their best to tighten it all down, it’s simply and fundamentally insecure. The U.S. Navy and Department of Defense get this now. Maybe it’s time for the consumer to pick up on that thread and demand Linux on their desktops.</p><p>After all, if it’s good enough for the DOD and the Navy, isn’t it good enough for you?</p><p>I can already hear the naysayers proclaiming their usual litany of hate and doubt.</p><p>“Not enough games!” “No support!” “It doesn’t run ‘X’!”</p><p>Well, guess what, if there’s enough demand for it, eventually those complaints will fade away. Think of it like a relationship — you want to start a long term relationship built on a foundation of stability, friendship, and trust. Why? Because eventually the bedroom antics will dissipate and what remains will have to carry you into your twilight. Wouldn’t you rather have an operating system built on that same, strong foundation? Your love of games will eventually fade away. If your platform is solid and secure, you’ll enjoy it for many years to come. And if more people begin enjoying the Linux platform, eventually the games and the support and ‘X’ will arrive as well.</p><p>The U.S. Navy saw this.</p><p>Be the Navy.</p><p>About Jack Wallen</p><p>A writer for over 12 years, Jack's primary focus is on the Linux operating system and its effects on the open source and non-open source communities.</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-64035554387635507332012-06-29T20:53:00.001-04:002012-06-29T20:53:55.743-04:00Linux grabs its single biggest win | Jack Wallen TechRepublic<div class='posterous_autopost'>By Jack Wallen June 18, 2012, 7:48 AM PDT<p>Takeaway: The U.S. Navy and Dept. of Defense have learned valuable lessons that translate to huge contracts for the Linux OS. What does this mean for open source and the community that drives it? Jack Wallen offers his take.</p><p>Northrop Grumman Transformational Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle system. Ever hear of it? It’s a U.S. Navy drone, otherwise known as the MQ-8B Fire Scout. Why is it significant? Because recently the Navy decided to drop the Windows operating system that was running in favor of Linux. And just why did they drop the previous operating system?</p><p>A virus.</p><p>That’s right…previously a virus had infected the operating system on the U.S. Air Force’s drone control system.</p><p>A virus…on the system controlling drones. Think about it. Imagine the consequences of a drone or fighter plane suffering from a computer virus — while armed! That was a significant enough “oops” to lead the U.S. Navy to migrate their drone systems from Windows to Linux.</p><p>When I read this, I was shocked. First and foremost, I couldn’t believe such planes were controlled by anything powered with any flavor of the Windows operating system — not when the U.S. Navy has enough intelligence and resources to even create their own OS. Once that shock flushed from my system, I had to wonder…who would be the one to run Combofix on the systems running those drones? What a horrible job that would be…having to take the fall for an infected computer system on a military aircraft.</p><p>Anyway…I digress.</p><p>The decision brings a 28 million dollar contract to the Linux community (who, exactly, will be getting this contract is unknown), but that is not all. Based on this (and other issues) with non-free software, the U.S. Department of Defense is laying out guidelines on how its agencies can use open source code. And even though the DOD’s use of open source code will alter the GPL for said code (they can’t, for obvious reasons, release any code they use and modify back into the wild), this is a huge deal for open source everywhere.</p><p>Think about it. The DOD has decided that open source is a more secure and reliable route than proprietary systems. That trickle down is going to have a serious, lasting effect in the world of Linux. Here’s how I see this working:</p><p>DOD begins Linux roll out US Government begins wide-spread roll out Civilian security companies world-wide begin roll out Universities fall in line Consumers begin clamoring for better security on their OS</p><p>Although this could seem like a pipe dream (for this to rain down upon the consumers), if the masses really want to start getting serious about their security (and they should), this should be a lesson from up high that should not be taken lightly.</p><p>Windows is a good desktop operating system — but one with many, serious security flaws. And although Microsoft is doing their best to tighten it all down, it’s simply and fundamentally insecure. The U.S. Navy and Department of Defense get this now. Maybe it’s time for the consumer to pick up on that thread and demand Linux on their desktops.</p><p>After all, if it’s good enough for the DOD and the Navy, isn’t it good enough for you?</p><p>I can already hear the naysayers proclaiming their usual litany of hate and doubt.</p><p>“Not enough games!” “No support!” “It doesn’t run ‘X’!”</p><p>Well, guess what, if there’s enough demand for it, eventually those complaints will fade away. Think of it like a relationship — you want to start a long term relationship built on a foundation of stability, friendship, and trust. Why? Because eventually the bedroom antics will dissipate and what remains will have to carry you into your twilight. Wouldn’t you rather have an operating system built on that same, strong foundation? Your love of games will eventually fade away. If your platform is solid and secure, you’ll enjoy it for many years to come. And if more people begin enjoying the Linux platform, eventually the games and the support and ‘X’ will arrive as well.</p><p>The U.S. Navy saw this.</p><p>Be the Navy.</p><p>Get IT Tips, news, and reviews delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to TechRepublic’s free newsletters.</p><p>About Jack Wallen</p><p>A writer for over 12 years, Jack's primary focus is on the Linux operating system and its effects on the open source and non-open source communities.</p><p>Join the conversation!</p><p>See all comments See all comments</p><p>Join the TechRepublic Community and join the conversation! Signing-up is free and quick, Do it now, we want to hear your opinion.</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-78283106401146559722012-06-12T21:46:00.001-04:002012-06-12T21:46:13.498-04:00Why The Economy Can’t Get Out of First Gear | ROBERT B. REICH,<div class='posterous_autopost'>TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 2012<p>Rarely in history has the cause of a major economic problem been so clear yet have so few been willing to see it.</p><p>The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s economists tell us, because taxes are too high oñ corporations and the rich, and safety nets are too generous to the needy. It’s not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn’t spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus.</p><p>The answer is in front of our faces. It’s because American consumers, whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity, don’t have the dough to buy enough to boost the economy – and they can no longer borrow like they could before the crash of 2008.</p><p>If you have any doubt, just take a look at the Survey of Consumer Finances, released Monday</p><p>Reserve. Median family income was $49,600 in 2007. By 2010 it was $45,800 – a drop of 7.7%.</p><p>All of the gains from economic growth have been going to the richest 1 percent – who, because they’re so rich, spend no more than half what they take in.</p><p>Can I say this any more simply? The earnings of the great American middle class fueled</p><p>expansion for three decades after World War II. Their relative lack of earnings in more recent years set us up for the great American bust.</p><p>Starting around 1980, globalization and automation began exerting downward pressure on median wages. Employers began busting unions in order to make more profits. And increasingly deregulated financial markets began taking over the real economy.</p><p>The result was slower wage growth for most households. Women surged into paid work in order to prop up family incomes – which helped for a time. But the median wage kept flattening, and then, after 2001, began to decline.</p><p>Households tried to keep up by going deeply into debt, using the rising values of their homes as collateral. This also helped – for a time. But then the housing bubble popped.</p><p>The Fed’s latest report shows how loud that pop was. Between 2007 and 2010 (the latest data available) American families’ median net worth fell almost 40 percent – down to levels last seen in 1992. The typical family’s wealth is their home, not their stock portfolio – and housing values have dropped by a third since 2006.</p><p>Families have also become less confident about how much income they can expect in the future. In 2010, over 35% of American families said they did not “have a good idea of what their income would be for the next year.” That’s up from 31.4% in 2007.</p><p>But because their incomes and their net worth have both dropped, families are saving less.</p><p>families that said they had saved in the preceding year fell from 56.4% in 2007 to 52% in 2010, the lowest level since the Fed began collecting that information in 1992.</p><p>Bottom line: The American economy is still struggling because the vast American middle class can’t spend more to get it out of first gear.</p><p>What to do? There’s no simple answer in the short term except to hope we stay in first gear and don`t slide backwards.</p><p>Over the longer term the answer is to make sure the middle class gets far more of the gains from economic growth.</p><p>How? We might learn something from history. During the 1920s, income concentrated at the top. By 1928, the top 1 percent was raking in an astounding 23.94 percent of the total (close to the 23.5 percent the top 1 percent got in 2007) according to analyses of tax records by my colleague Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. At that point the bubble popped and we fell into the Great Depression.</p><p>But then came the Wagner Act, requiring employers to bargain in good faith with organized labor. Social Security and unemployment insurance.</p><p>Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. A national minimum wage. And to contain Wall Street: The Securities Act and Glass-Steagall Act.</p><p>In 1941 America went to war – a vast mobilization that employed every able-bodied adult and put money in their pockets. And after the war, the GI Bill, sending millions of returning veterans to college. A vast expansion of public higher education. and infrastructure investments, such as the National Defense Highway Act. Taxes on the rich remained at least 70 percent until 1981.</p><p>The result: By 1957, the top 1 percent of Americans raked in only 10.1 percent of total income. Most of the rest went to a growing middle class – whose members fueled the greatest economic boom in the history of the world.</p><p>Get it? We won’t get out of first gear until the middle class regains the bargaining power it had in the first three decades after World War II to claim a much larger share of the gains from productivity growth.</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-10491442167658596502012-06-12T21:23:00.001-04:002012-06-12T21:23:00.547-04:00Virginia's dying marshes and climate change denial | Daniel Nasaw BBC News Magazine<div class='posterous_autopost'>5 June 2012 Last updated at 20:12 ET<br />By Daniel Nasaw BBC News Magazine<br />York River, Virginia<p>Dying wetland trees along Virginia's coastline are evidence that rising sea levels threaten nature and humans, scientists say - and show the limits of political action amid climate change scepticism.</p><p>Dead trees loom over the marsh like the bones of a whale beached long ago.</p><p>In the salt marshes along the banks of the York River in the US state of Virginia, pine and cedar trees and bushes of holly and wax myrtle occupy small islands, known as hummocks.</p><p>But as the salty estuary waters have risen in recent years, they have drowned the trees on the hummocks' lower edges. If - when - the sea level rises further, it will inundate and drown the remaining trees and shrubs, and eventually sink the entire marsh.</p><p>That threatens the entire surrounding ecosystem, because fish, oysters and crabs depend on the marsh grass for food.</p><p>These are just the early warning signs of what's coming, says avian ecologist Bryan Watts, stepping carefully among the fallen pines.</p><p>The sea level in the Chesapeake Bay area and in south-eastern Virginia is predicted to rise by as much as 5.2ft (1.6m) by the end of the century.</p><p>Ancient geologic forces are causing the land literally to sink, while the amount of water in the oceans is increasing because of global warming, scientists say.</p><p>As a result, the low-lying coastal areas - and the towns in it - are at tremendous risk of flooding.</p><p>To address the problem, climate scientists, environmentalists and their political supporters say the US must dramatically reduce its fossil fuel emissions, while also taking steps to lessen the impact of coastal flooding and wetland erosion.</p><p>There is time to turn the ship around, says Michael Mann, a former University of Virginia climate scientist, but there is not a whole lot of time. </p><p>But in Virginia's state capital Richmond, as in Washington, many politicians remain sceptical about the extent to which humans are responsible for global warming.</p><p>They fear measures needed to curb climate change would hurt the economy, threaten private property, and harm commercial and industrial interests.</p><p>Here in Virginia there is very little political will to address the mitigation side of things - reducing our carbon footprint, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says Carl Hershner, who studies coastal resources management at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.</p><p>There is a high degree of scepticism in the political and the general public. </p><p>Virginia's attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli, has waged an aggressive public battle against the Obama administration's efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, which he said would drive up electricity costs and kill jobs in the state's coal industry.</p><p>While politicians in Washington and in Richmond, Virginia's state capital, have done little to address the problem, authorities along Virginia's coast have watched the waters rise and have been forced to take action.</p><p>The city government of Norfolk spends about $6m (£3.8m) a year to elevate roads, improve drainage, and help homeowners literally raise their houses to keep their ground floors dry, says Assistant City Manager Ron Williams.</p><p>About 5%-10% of the city's lowest-lying neighbourhoods are subject to heavy flooding during storms. City planners do not currently recommend any areas be abandoned to the tide, but you have to have the conversation as you look 50 years out , Mr Williams says.</p><p>At Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval base, the US Navy is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to replace aging piers with new ones better able to withstand the rising water.</p><p>Sea level rise was having a measurable impact on the readiness of the ships, says retired Capt Joseph Bouchard, who was commander of the base from 2000-2003. And that's unacceptable. </p><p>So the Navy decided to replace the old piers with double-decked piers - one for utilities, the other for the ship operations - with the upper deck 21ft above current sea level.</p><p>Were it not for sea level rise caused by climate change, the Navy could have replaced those piers with single deck piers at much much less cost, he says.</p><p>Even a measure as ostensibly mild as funding for a flooding study was fraught with climate change politics.</p><p>Senator Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and Chris Stolle, a Republican member of the Virginia's lower House of Delegates, this year shepherded a resolution through the legislature spending $50,000 on a comprehensive study of the economic impact of coastal flooding on the Virginia and to investigate ways to adapt.</p><p>To pass the bill, at Stolle's suggestion Northam excised the words relative sea level rise from an initial draft of the bill, replacing them with recurrent flooding in the final version.</p><p>Stolle says the change was necessary to ensure the bill focused on the issues Virginia politicians can handle - flooding - and not those they cannot address - global warming. In any case, the jury's still out on mankind' s contribution to global warming, he says.</p><p>Other folks can go argue about sea-level rise and global warming, Stolle says. What matters is people's homes are getting destroyed, and that's what we want to focus on. To think that we are going to stop climate change is absolute hubris. The climate is going to change whether we're here or not. </p><p>Northam describes the change in language as pragmatic politics - necessary to win support from conservatives sceptical of climate change science.</p><p>If you mention climate change to them, it's like a big red flag, he says. A barrier goes up. That's the way it is here in the Virginia. </p><p>BBC © 2012</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-63745514706510082462012-06-12T21:15:00.001-04:002012-06-12T21:15:07.003-04:00Science Denial Is a Large and Growing Problem | Ryan Cooper Washington Monthly<div class='posterous_autopost'>June 11, 2012 3:06 PM<p>Kevin Drum isn’t happy with the latest talk around the long-running evolution belief survey, and people wringing their hands over the fact that nearly half of American’s espouse a recent creationism view when it comes to humankind:</p><p>Come on. This 46% number has barely budged over the past three decades, and I’m willing to bet it was at least as high back in the 50s and early 60s, that supposed golden age of comity and bipartisanship. It simply has nothing to do with whether we can all get along and nothing to do with whether we can construct a civil discourse.</p><p>The fact is that belief in evolution has virtually no real-life impact on anything. That’s why 46% of the country can safely choose not to believe it: their lack of belief has precisely zero effect on their lives. Sure, it’s a handy way of saying that they’re God-fearing Christians — a “cultural signifier,” as Andrew puts it — but our lives are jam-packed with cultural signifiers. This is just one of thousands, one whose importance probably barely cracks America’s top 100 list.</p><p>And the reason it doesn’t is that even creationists don’t take their own views seriously. How do I know this? Well, creationists like to fight over whether we should teach evolution in high school, but they never go much beyond that. Nobody wants to remove it from university biology departments. Nobody wants to shut down actual medical research that depends on the workings of evolution. In short, almost nobody wants to fight evolution except at the purely symbolic level of high school curricula, the one place where it barely matters in the first place. The dirty truth is that a 10th grade knowledge of evolution adds only slightly to a 10th grade understanding of biology.</p><p>I think this goes too far. For starters, saying evolution adds only slightly to a 10th grade understanding of biology is to say that there is no 10th grade understanding of biology, at all. Evolution is the single most important concept in biology, the idea that changed it from a random collection of facts to a real scientific discipline. Biology without evolution is akin to physics without math, and denying it is akin to denying heliocentrism.</p><p>Furthermore, I say a lack of wide understanding of evolution is hurting the country, most obviously in the form of antibiotic resistance. Industrial feedlots grow their animals stewed in powerful antibiotics to shave their operating costs, which is leading to bacteria evolving past them and resistant infections cropping up in humans. It’s a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, which are tough to overcome in any case, but an understanding of evolution makes the situation immediately and alarmingly obvious, while disbelief can cloud the situation. Witness hack “scientists” at Liberty University, who publish work quibbling with the details of the evidence and thereby muddy the conversation. I’m not saying that’s the only factor, but surely if 80 percent of the country had a strong understanding of evolution, it would be easier to horsewhip the FDA into outlawing antibiotic use in non-sick animals.</p><p>More fundamentally, science denial in general is growing like gangbusters on the right, most obviously with respect to climate change. All the denier techniques now in common use among people like Jim DeMint—hysterical accusations, the fog of bogus but science-y sounding data, incessant TV appearances of the few deniers with actual credentials, taking things out of context, character assassination, repetition of debunked talking points, etc.—all these were perfected in the trenches of the evolution-creationism wars. It’s no accident that global warming denial found such fertile ground on the right.</p><p>Ryan Cooper is a General Assistant at the Washington Monthly, on Twitter at twitter.com/ryanlcooper.</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-50781995707813146762012-06-12T20:50:00.001-04:002012-06-12T20:50:03.630-04:00The Fiscal Legacy of George W. Bush | BRUCE BARTLETT The New York Times<div class='posterous_autopost'>Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”<p>Republicans assert that Barack Obama assumed sole responsibility for the budget on Jan. 20, 2009. From that date, all increases in the debt or deficit are his responsibility and no one else’s, they say.</p><p>The Fiscal Legacy of George W. Bush<br />JUNE 12, 2012, 6:00 AM </p><p>By BRUCE BARTLETT</p><p>This is, of course, nonsense – and the American people know it. As I documented in a previous post, even today 43 percent of them hold George W. Bush responsible for the current budget deficit versus only 14 percent who blame Mr. Obama.</p><p>The American people are right; Mr. Bush is more responsible, as a new report from the Congressional Budget Office documents.</p><p>In January 2001, the office projected that the federal government would run a total budget surplus of $3.5 trillion through 2008 if policy was unchanged and the economy continued according to forecast. In fact, there was a deficit of $5.5 trillion.</p><p>The projected surplus was primarily the result of two factors. First was a big tax increase in 1993 that every Republican in Congress voted against, saying that it would tank the economy. This belief was wrong. The economy boomed in 1994, growing 4.1 percent that year and strongly throughout the Clinton administration.</p><p>The second major contributor to budget surpluses that emerged in 1998 was tough budget controls that were part of the 1990 and 1993 budget deals. The main one was a requirement that spending could not be increased or taxes cut unless offset by spending cuts or tax increases. This was known as Paygo, for pay as you go.</p><p>During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush warned that budget surpluses were dangerous because Congress might spend them, even though Paygo rules prevented this from happening. His Feb. 28, 2001, budget message reiterated this point and asserted that future surpluses were likely to be even larger than projected due principally to anticipated strong revenue growth.</p><p>This was the primary justification for a big tax cut. Subsequently, as it became clear that the economy was slowing – a recession began in March 2001 – that became a further justification.</p><p>The 2001 tax cut did nothing to stimulate the economy, yet Republicans pushed for additional tax cuts in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2008. The economy continued to languish even as the Treasury hemorrhaged revenue, which fell to 17.5 percent of the gross domestic product in 2008 from 20.6 percent in 2000. Republicans abolished Paygo in 2002, and spending rose to 20.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2008 from 18.2 percent in 2001.</p><p>According to the C.B.O., by the end of the Bush administration, legislated tax cuts reduced revenues and increased the national debt by $1.6 trillion. Slower-than-expected growth further reduced revenues by $1.4 trillion.</p><p>However, the Bush tax cuts continued through 2010, well into the Obama administration. These reduced revenues by another $369 billion, adding that much to the debt. Legislated tax cuts enacted by President Obama and Democrats in Congress reduced revenues by an additional $407 billion in 2009 and 2010. Slower growth reduced revenues by a further $1.3 trillion. Contrary to Republican assertions, there were no additional revenues from legislated tax increases.</p><p>In late 2010, Mr. Obama agreed to extend all the Bush tax cuts for another two years. In 2011, this reduced revenues by $105 billion.</p><p>On the spending side, legislated increases during the Bush administration added $2.4 trillion to deficits and the debt through 2008. This includes $121 billion for Medicare Part D, a new entitlement program enacted by Republicans in 2003.</p><p>Economic factors added almost nothing to increased spending – just $27 billion in total. This is mainly because interest rates were much lower than C.B.O. had anticipated, leading to lower spending for interest on the debt.</p><p>After 2008, it becomes harder to separate spending that was initiated under Mr. Bush from that under Mr. Obama. We do know that spending for Part D has risen rapidly – Republicans phased in the program to disguise its budgetary cost – adding $150 billion to the debt during 2009-11.</p><p>According to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased the debt by $795 billion through the end of fiscal 2008. The continuation of these wars by Mr. Obama added another $488 billion through the end of 2011.</p><p>Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.</p><p>Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011.</p><p>Republicans would have us believe that somehow we could have avoided the recession and balanced the budget since 2009 if only they had been in charge. This would be a neat trick considering that the recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.</p><p>They would also have us believe that all of the increase in debt resulted solely from higher spending, nothing from lower revenues caused by tax cuts. And they continually imply that one of the least popular spending increases of recent years, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was an Obama administration program, when in fact it was a Bush administration initiative proposed by the Treasury Department that was signed into law by Mr. Bush on Oct. 3, 2008.</p><p>Lastly, Republicans continue to insist that tax cuts are highly stimulative, often saying that they add nothing to the debt, when this is obviously ridiculous.</p><p>Conversely, they are adamant that tax increases must not be part of any deficit-reduction package because they never reduce deficits and instead are spent. This is also ridiculous, as the experience of the Clinton administration clearly shows. The new C.B.O. data confirm these facts.</p><p>Copyright 2012</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-54681268378058529352012-06-09T15:41:00.001-04:002012-06-09T15:41:43.335-04:00Understanding Bitcoin | Al Jazeera Nicolas Mendoza<div class='posterous_autopost'>Bitcoin is at the forefront of 'hacktivism', giving its users a free alternative to contemporary financial mechanisms. Last Modified: 09 Jun 2012 16:14<p>Bitcoin is an online decentralised economic system bypassing traditional infrastructures of modern finance [zcopley] The above image is licensed under Creative Commons, and can be found here.</p><p>Hong Kong - The term hacktivism has been grossly misconstrued by the media. The image of masked saboteurs attacking from the darkness has romantic appeal but this spectacular narrative of sabotage ultimately misinforms, other-ising hackers and distorting hacking itself. Richard Stallman defines hacking as exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness . Real hacktivism, then, is less about denial of service attacks, which are acts of digital protest, than about the clever creation or intervention of software forms for social change. It is less about sabotage than about alternatives.</p><p>Hacktivism allows dissent to overcome the limitations of protest, actually implementing alternatives and making them widely available without asking for permission from the status quo. It gives wings to the possibility for gradual peaceful revolution: alternatives no longer need to remain dreams, but can become real options for real people.</p><p>Hacktivism often opens real spaces by selling the idea first to the machines, after which people realise other ways are possible and allow themselves to think in new ways. This is what the work of a programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto did for economics. In 2008 he coded a critique of the world's monetary system into a P2P computer protocol he called Bitcoin. Bitcoin started running on January 3, 2009, and is now a working decentralised monetary system with thousands of users around the world.</p><p>The Bitcoin protocol is based on a fundamental critique of the world's monetary system: that it demands undeserved amounts of trust from us. Nakamoto thought that it would be better to place trust outside the monetary system itself and back into social life:</p><p>The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible. </p><p>Through a clever use of encryption technology, the Bitcoin protocol enables this move. In networked storage systems, Nakamoto explains, strong encryption technology affords end users peace of mind because they no longer need to trust the system admin with their privacy. He argues that if money could be similarly encrypted, middlemen who provide trust (e.g. banks) could be bypassed:</p><p>It's time we had the same thing [strong encryption] for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless. (…)</p><p>[Bitcoin] takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle. The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double spending. </p><p>The result is Bitcoin. It is not controlled by any state nor owned by any company; neither is it a company in itself. It is merely an open source computer protocol that runs over the internet.</p><p>Finite fiat, if I may</p><p>Strictly speaking, I would argue, Bitcoin is a fiat currency. The term fiat is Latin for let it be done: it designates systems where an entity (eg the Federal Reserve) summons new money into existence by saying, in a god-like way, let it be done . In the case of Bitcoin new coins are brought into existence across the network by the algorithms in the protocol.</p><p>No entity or individuals are entitled to new bitcoins on merits other than their standing among the sum of active nodes in the network in terms of computing power. Of course, anyone can also earn already-existing bitcoins through work, through the exchange of goods and services, or (in the case of social organisations) through the trust the public places on their ability to do good.</p><p>In short, bitcoins are created through a transparent and distributed process determined by mathematics. Bitcoin is finite post-Westphalian fiat, a monetary system where currency is indeed created, but through an algorithm driven by the logic of the network of distributed - rather than concentrated - power.</p><p>Bitcoin does a better job than central entities (like the Fed) at creating new money because it does so in a decentralised way and without the need to create debt; it does a better job at storage than banks because it does so for free; and it does a better job at transfer than SWIFT because it is faster, cheaper, available to anyone, and not subjected to the control of Western powers: SWIFT's ability to blockade Iranian banking transactions shows the ultimately unilateral nature of global financial channels.</p><p>What we have here is radically different from the current system where money creation is based on debt, politically motivated, surrounded by secrecy, inflationary, unilateralist, colonialist, and exploitative of powerless nations, etc. The flaws in the design of modern currency are at the roots of the social and ecological disasters we face today. Alternative currencies in general hold the promise of a way out, and the emergence of a vibrant Bitcoin economy in particular is one of the most interesting developments in recent times.</p><p>Money not owed</p><p>Bitcoin, I think, is revolutionary especially because it distributes the creation of money. The current system, based on national and personal debt, insidiously concedes obscene yet hard to object power to rich nations and global banks. Debt-based money not only provides exorbitant privileges to powerful nations and threatens collapse in Europe and the US under its own absurdity; it also deforms the nature of human sociality.</p><p>The disastrous social consequences of placing debt at the root of the creation of money cannot be understated. A society whose currency is backed by debt (aka the modern world) is a society where freedom is just a word because the reality of everyday life, even for the middle classes of so-called rich countries, tends toward sublimated forms of slavery or debt peonage. An economy built on debt-based currency can only grow , the 2008 economic collapse showed us, by putting more people deeper into debt. Inevitably, this leads to a society where the many always owe more and more to the few, eventually making democracy a farce. Bankers, as Robert Fisk puts it, are the dictators of the West.</p><p>The whole world's formal economy is backed by debt, and debt is backed by violence. This can be verified by defaulting, and subsequently resisting eviction: state force will be used sooner rather than later. Anthropologist David Graeber, one of the most prominent scholars in the Occupy Wall Street movement, articulates in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, how debt embeds our culture and our very selves into an inhuman, unsustainable, condition of iniquity:</p><p>…by turning human sociality itself into debts, they transform the very foundations of our being since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with others into matters of fault, sin, and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity that can only be overcome by completing some great cosmic transaction that will annihilate everything. </p><p>The P2P money creation system that Bitcoin proposes is truly something else as it deflates the dark power of debt-based money in society; it allows envisioning a world where the wheels of debt are no longer at the origin of economic activity. This does not mean that Bitcoin is necessarily the final and perfect answer to our needs, but it is an important step in demonstrating that it can be done.</p><p>Ten years</p><p>It has already been over three years since the Bitcoin protocol started running, and yet these are still the very early days. What Nakamoto created is really just an open and autonomous backbone for global finance. Several layers of complementary technologies and services will need to be developed around this backbone before Bitcoin can aspire to really become an operational global currency for the 21st century.</p><p>Cleverly, he devised a system in a way that planted the incentive to take over this extremely complex task in individuals likely to have intimate knowledge of technology and an understanding of the nature of networked sociality.</p><p>The first miners joined the network out of intellectual curiosity when it was nothing more than an experiment posted to an obscure cryptography forum. Bitcoins were easy to mine in the beginning, and as the network grew they gained real value. Suddenly many realised they had run into small fortunes, that they could potentially become larger fortunes if Bitcoin succeeded, and that it was really up to them to make it happen. They understood that their success depends on making Bitcoin useful, safe and easy for the largest possible amount of people.</p><p>Bitcoin entrepreneurs have already developed an impressive, if experimental and imperfect, ecology of operational support infrastructures. Available services include exchange, escrow, arbitrage, transfer, storage, consulting, investment, auction, payment, mobile support, etc. A lot of things can already be paid for using Bitcoin. These services are autonomous initiatives, driven by no authority other than that which emanates from the needs of Bitcoin users and the nature of the Bitcoin protocol</p><p>On a larger scale, Bitcoin's neutrality also gives it the potential to be a good national reserve currency as well as a low-friction medium for international trade. Governments, especially in poor countries , could start their own Bitcoin mining operations and make Bitcoin an acceptable means of tax payment: a Bitcoin reserves strategy could shield vulnerable economies from global currency cycles and provide increased autonomy from foreign powers.</p><p>If Bitcoin is to become a widely used everyday currency, it will not happen overnight. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, believes that it will take Bitcoin about eight more years to reach the level of usability required for wide adoption:</p><p>I predict that Bitcoin will reach usability sometime around 2019. I base that prediction on earlier disruption technologies, where blogging started appearing in 1994 and reached mainstream adoption in 2004; file sharing started in 1989 over the net and Napster hit in 1999. You had streaming video 1995, mainly porn sites streaming animated gifs, what was then tip of the spear technology; Youtube was founded 2005 and just swept the floor with everyone else just because they were usable. This is not something bad; it is just an observation that it takes ten years to get a disruptive technology from inception to becoming so easy to use that it reaches mainline adoption. </p><p>When it comes to money, people are understandably reluctant towards experimentation. Either it works, meaning it provides clear advantages, or it doesn't. No part of the Bitcoin economy will last unless it is objectively a better deal for the end user than the flawed-but-known ways of today. In this sense Bitcoin is perhaps one of the hacktivist revolution's greatest tests: can the network itself actually handle the globe's finance? Can it really deliver better money for this incredibly complex world? It could very well be that it actually will. It seems to be advancing in that direction, slowly, step by step.</p><p>Nicolás Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne and a member of the P2P Foundation. Nicolas Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne. Follow him on Twitter: @nicolasmendo</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-32948831143899912182012-06-08T16:04:00.001-04:002012-06-08T16:04:12.614-04:00Romney wrong on tax cuts | Fareed Zakaria OpEd in The Washington Post<div class='posterous_autopost'>Fareed Zakaria<p>Thursday, Jun 7, 2012 The Obama campaign’s attack ad about Bain Capital presented a simplistic picture of a complicated reality. Private-equity firms can play a crucial role in keeping companies competitive. And although some firms have engaged in some bad practices, on the whole the industry has grown so large because it performs a useful function. But the worst part about the ad was that it had little to do with America’s challenges or Obama’s policies.</p><p>By contrast, Mitt Romney’s first major ad is substantive — and wrong. He tells us that on his first day in office — after approving the Keystone XL pipeline — he will “introduce tax cuts . . . that reward job creators not punish them.” The one idea that is almost certain not to jump-start this economy is a tax cut.</p><p>Why can we be sure of this? Because that is what we have done for the past three years. For those who think President Obama’s policies have done little to produce growth, keep in mind that the single largest piece of his policies — in dollar terms — has been tax cuts. They actually began before Obama, with the tax cut passed under the George W. Bush administration in response to the financial crisis in 2008. Then came the stimulus bill, of which tax cuts were the largest chunk by far — one-third of the total. The Department of Transportation, by contrast, got 6 percent of the total to fix infrastructure.</p><p>That wasn’t the end of it. There was the payroll tax cut, the small business tax cut, the extension of the payroll tax cut, and so on. The president’s Twitter feed boasted: “President Obama has signed 21 tax cuts to support middle class families.” And how has that worked out?</p><p>In the wake of a financial crisis caused by excessive debt, tax cuts are highly unlikely to lead to increased economic activity. People use the money to pay down their debts rather than shop for cars, houses and appliances. As for the idea that job creators are not creating jobs because their taxes are too high, think about it: Would Mitt Romney invest more of his money in American factories if only he had paid less than the 13.9 percent rate he paid last year? Please!</p><p>The Wall Street Journal invoked Milton Friedman to say that the problem with all of these tax cuts is that they are temporary. If only we had across-the-board cuts in rates. Except that these were tried as well. The 2001 Bush tax cuts were designed precisely along those lines. They were, in dollar terms, the largest tax cuts in U.S. history.</p><p>And the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded in 2010 that “by almost any economic indicator, the economy performed better in the period before the [Bush] tax cuts than after the tax cuts were enacted. . . . GDP growth, median real household income growth, weekly hours worked, the employment-population ratio, personal savings, and business investment growth were all lower in the period after the tax cuts were enacted.” The years 2000 to 2007 were the period of the weakest job growth in the United States since the Great Depression.</p><p>The one certain effect of tax cuts would be to balloon the deficit. Bruce Bartlett, a former economic official under Ronald Reagan, points out that the aggregate revenue loss of the Bush tax cuts was the largest in U.S. history. “Both Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan passed larger individual tax cuts, but both took back about half of them with subsequent tax increases.”</p><p>When pressed, Romney and his advisers sometimes say that they are just for tax reform; other times, they cite the Simpson-Bowles plan. I’ve long argued that reforming the nation’s bloated and corrupt tax code is vital and that Simpson-Bowles is a superb framework for deficit reduction. But neither will cut taxes. Simpson-Bowles raises them by more than a trillion dollars. You can use euphemisms such as “ending tax expenditures” and “closing loopholes,” but when you do that, someone’s taxes will go up. And when you close big loopholes such as the deduction of mortgage interest — which is the only way to get real revenue —tens of millions of peoples’ taxes will go up.</p><p>Tax cuts have been a central cause of America’s deficit problems. For four decades, Washington politicians have bought popularity by cutting taxes, always saying that spending cuts or growth will make up for lost revenue. That rarely happened, and the result is $11 trillion in federal debt held by the public. To perpetuate this pandering one more time is not just dishonest — it is dangerous.</p><p><a href="mailto:comments@fareedzakaria.com">comments@fareedzakaria.com</a></p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-81305073012195236822012-06-04T21:37:00.001-04:002012-06-04T21:37:59.621-04:00Salt, We Misjudged You | The New York Times<div class='posterous_autopost'>June 2, 2012 <br />By GARY TAUBES Oakland, Calif.<p>THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.</p><p>While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No. 1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.</p><p>And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.</p><p>When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.</p><p>“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”</p><p>While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.</p><p>WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility.” Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.</p><p>The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.</p><p>In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.</p><p>Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 —publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.</p><p>In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.</p><p>While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”</p><p>The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.</p><p>With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.</p><p>Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.</p><p>One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.</p><p>Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”</p><p>When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”</p><p>This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”</p><p>A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research and the author of “Why We Get Fat.”</p></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13050094.post-78168367208532066762012-05-31T22:37:00.001-04:002012-05-31T22:37:35.215-04:00Friends....<div class='posterous_autopost'><div class="posterous_bookmarklet_entry"> <a href="http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/5c1103507b80012f2fe000163e41dd5b?width=900.0"><img class="posterous_download_image" src="http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/5c1103507b80012f2fe000163e41dd5b?width=900.0" border="0" height="275" width="500" /></a><div class="posterous_quote_citation">via <a href="http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/5c1103507b80012f2fe000163e41dd5b?width=900.0">cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com</a></div> <p></p></div></div>Johniachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10103912660986592955noreply@blogger.com0