Author Archives: Hue White

Just for speaking truth to hypocrisy …

Business – particularly Big Business – has been responsible for horrific acts over the years, from the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, to hideous chronic pollution and wanton destruction of natural resources, to simply you name it.  But their relentless pursuit of the dollar also forces them to pay extremely close attention to reality – and this is a good thing.  Sami Grover @ TreeHugger.com writes about a new climate change initiative:

Today appears to mark another step change in magnitude, as reported over at Business Green, 13 US companies will pledge to invest $140 billion in the fight against climate change, while slashing their own emissions and water use too.

In many ways, it appears our business leaders are out in front of our political representatives, taking bolder action than government is able (or willing) to do. That said, the White House is a central coordinating partner in the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, which is expected to see more businesses sign up over the coming months. So perhaps it’s more true to say that our political leaders (at least some of them) are beginning to understand that they’ll need to make the economic case for climate action, and business leaders can help them do that.

Sami reports this is in addition to prior commitments by IKEA, Apple and Amazon.  In an item nearly a year old, Sami also reports on Google’s withdrawal from ALEC, an organization earlier mentioned here:

Because, as revealed in a Diane Rehm interview with Eric Schmidt, Google just quit ALEC. And Schmidt came right out and accused the lobbying group of lying about climate change in the process. …

Eric Schmidt’s announcement that Google was breaking ties with ALEC will be welcome news indeed for anyone who cares about a livable climate. Schmidt left no room for doubt in his interview about why this break up is happening. Here’s a transcript of Schmidt’s comments, as reported by the National Journal:

“Well, the company has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts—what a shock,” Schmidt said. “And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people—they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”

Few businesses do well in chaos, especially when their customers are stricken and suddenly lacking money for purchases because they’re bailing water out of their basements – or fleeing for their lives.  Businesses adore predictability.  Climate change is all about chaos, the signals are there – and the big boats are beginning to turn.  The list of signees comes from WhiteHouse.gov:

Alcoa, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Cargill, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo, UPS, and Walmart.

The next step is for the signees to use this to generate good will for their products – and ding their competitors.  Also worthy of note is the emergence of companies practicing conscious capitalism – such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, well-known for proclaiming its green credentials.

From a wider viewpoint, one must wonder if the last couple of years are starting to signal a rift between a GOP increasingly controlled by a deeply religious conservative faction, and businesses who find the assumptions of this new GOP are no longer compatible with good business practices.  We saw signs of a rift earlier this year when Indiana passed a law widely interpreted as giving small businesses the right to discriminate against virtually anyone they wished on religious grounds, resulting in various businesses and other organizations vowing to leave, or avoid, the state.  Indiana eventually replaced the law; other states with similar laws in the pipeline then did not pass their versions.

Will the business trend continue? Will it influence the upcoming Presidential race?  Will the Democrats seek closer Big Business ties in order to influence holdouts towards greener practices?  And what will those companies expressly involved in generating hideous pollution do?  The last question is one of the most important, for if they’re not given a way out, they’ll fight with all they have to preserve their right to pollute.

[Updated 8/14/2015 for missing link to conscious capitalism]

Regarding the public display of fossils, a reader writes:

Not only in Brazilian sidewalks, either… http://dcfossils.org/index.php/

Neat!  Haven’t gotten through the entire site, but it looks cool – if I ever get to Washington, I’ll have to put these on the list of places to go.  He also mentions this, closer to home.

In the discussion of the general structural problems plaguing the GOP, old friend Kevin McLeod @ The Blue Collar Scholar commented earlier this year:

There’s an alternative strategy the GOP can adopt without surrendering ties to its primary sponsors in the business world. Simply this; embrace secular Republicans. They can campaign on the traditional themes of fiscal conservatism, law and order, national security, but do it on a rational basis.

Secular Republicans can do business without the embarrassing baggage of religious conservatives; the treatment of women and minorities as second-class citizens, the ignorant dismissal of science, the insular arrogance that demands their way or the highway.

Sounds logical.  However, the deeply religious conservative faction is currently the dominant force in Iowa – the site of the first and one of the most important primaries in the nation.  Until their fingers can be pried off the levers of that particular power-piece, I think it’ll be well-nigh impossible for the religious element of the party to be demoted to the secondary status where it really belongs in a secular democracy.

The modern GOP leadership doesn’t want democracy. It wants mob rule. If you’re not a member of a faith-based club, you can’t hold office. Extending that viewpoint beyond the GOP extinguishes democracy. Empowering a mob can be good for business as long as it does business’ bidding; the day may come when it doesn’t.

I’m not so sure.  History is replete with mob rule’s often chaotic behavior – one day you’re on top, the next you’re crushed under the hay wagon’s wheels.

Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn take a shot at a new UK policy in NewScientist (18 July 2015):

Unemployment is being redefined as a psychological disorder at a time when the UK government has vowed to cut the welfare bill by £12 billion. It joins nations such as Australia and the US in increasingly requiring claimants to comply with interventions intended to modify emotions, beliefs and personality.

While the option of free access to therapy for the unemployed makes sense, what is taking place is psychological conditionality. Claimants must demonstrate characteristics deemed desirable in workplaces, like confidence and enthusiasm, in return for welfare.

The Department for Work and Pensions denies anyone will lose benefits if they refuse therapy. However, the Conservative party manifesto warned that those who refuse a recommended medical treatment could have their payments reviewed.

Claimants are already coerced into “confidence building” programmes, made to join humiliating psychological group activities (like building paper-clip towers), and to take meaningless and unethical psychological tests to determine “strengths”. …

The policies that rebrand unemployment as a psychological disorder distract from the insecurity and stark inequality seen in many labour markets. They promote the therapeutic value of work at a time when work is increasingly unable to provide either an income high enough to live on or emotional satisfaction.

The BBC reports the DWP disagrees:

But the DWP [Department for Works and Pensions] said Friedli and Stearns’ report had no basis in fact and was just relying on anecdotal evidence from blogs and social media.

“We know that being unemployed can be a difficult time, which is why our Jobcentre staff put so much time and effort into supporting people back into work as quickly as possible,” said a DWP spokesman.

“We offer support through a range of schemes so that jobseekers have the skills and experience that today’s employers need.”

At first blush, this seems straightforward: getting a job should not require a brain-washing.  But there is also no denying that certain habits and mindsets are detrimental in a job setting.  And it must be hard to be in a government position, to see that, and want to do something about it.

A friend sends a link concerning snakes with feet.  The MSN News link is mildly cute:

The slab of stone in an obscure museum was labeled “unknown fossil vertebrate.” But when British paleontologist David Martill saw it, he knew at once that it was something extraordinary.

“I thought, ‘Blimey! That’s a snake!’ … Then I looked more closely and said, ‘Bloody hell! It’s got back legs!'” says Martill, of Britain’s University of Portsmouth. When he noticed the fossil also had front legs, “I realized we’d actually got the missing link between lizards and snakes.” …

The new specimen, as befits a proper snake, has a long, slender neck and back. The fossil coils and writhes on its slab, which the researchers take as a sign that it was able to squeeze its meals into submission. Thus its scientific name: Tetrapodophis amplectus, or “four-footed snake that embraces.”

“Huggy the Snake,”Longrich jokes, “because he hugged his prey.”

LiveScience notes:

The roughly 120-million-year-old snake, dubbed Tetrapodophis amplectus (literally, four-legged snake), likely didn’t use its feet for walking. Instead, the appendages may have helped Tetrapodophis hold onto a partner while mating, or even grip unruly prey, said study co-researcher David Martill, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. …

Tetrapodophis and other ancient snakes hail from Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent that covered the Southern Hemisphere.

One can only hope all prey is unruly.  Photos of the fossil and artist’s conceptions of action shots of the live animal provided by LiveScience are here.  Science Magazine notes it has a murky provenance:

The specimen’s provenance seems to be murkier than the silty waters that once buried its carcass. Whereas the team’s analyses strongly suggest the fossil came from northeastern Brazil, details of when it was unearthed and how it eventually ended up in the German museum where it now resides remain a mystery. Those details matter to many researchers and especially to some from Brazil, because it’s been illegal to export fossils from that nation since 1942. …

The fossil had resided in a private collection for several decades before it gained the attention of team member David Martill of the University of Portsmouth. He stumbled across the specimen during a field trip with students to Museum Solnhofen in Germany. No notes about when or where it was collected are available, the researchers say. But certain characteristics of the limestone that entombed the fossil, as well as the distinct orange-brown color of the bones themselves, strongly suggest it came from a particular area of northeastern Brazil, Longrich says. The sediment that became those rocks accumulated in calm waters on the floor of a lake or a lagoon sometime between 113 million and 126 million years ago, he notes.

Not all paleontologists are sure this is a snake:

Tetrapodophis “has a really interesting mix of characters,” says Susan Evans, a paleobiologist at University College London. Although the creature’s teeth look snakelike, she admits, “I’m trying to carefully sit on the fence as to whether this is actually a snake.” A radical elongation of the body and reduction in size or loss of limbs has occurred many times in other groups of reptiles, she notes.

Another puzzle, she adds, are why the bones at the tips of the creature’s digits are so long. Longrich and his colleagues suggest the long-fingered feet are used for grasping prey or possibly used during mating. But Caldwell notes that such feet “are remarkably unusual unless you’re a tree-climber.”

And I just happened to glance at the comments section of the Science Magazine article and saw this fascinating tidbit:

cientistahumano • 2 days ago

Regarding the GOP, a correspondent notes:

With luck, perhaps the Acheulean period of GOP policy is winding down and new ideas will dawn on the Republican horizon…but I’m not holding my breath. They’ve traded stone axes for scriptures, but don’t seem capable of going beyond that.

I’m inclined to think a new political party, formed from the semi-sane remnants of the GOP, may emerge.  I have trouble visualizing its organizing tenets, though.

NewScientist (18 July 2015, paywall) discusses recent, incredible advances in the realm of brain-to-brain linkages:

TWO heads are better than one, and three monkey brains can control an avatar better than any single monkey. For the first time, animal brains have been linked to form a living computer.

If human brains could be similarly connected, it might give us superhuman problem-solving abilities and allow us to send abstract thoughts to each other. “It is really exciting,” says Iyad Rahwan at the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates. “It will change the way humans cooperate.”

The work builds on standard brain-machine interfaces – devices that have enabled people and animals to control machines and prosthetic limbs by thought alone. These tend to work by converting the brain’s electrical activity into signals that a computer can interpret. …

By synchronising their thoughts, the monkeys were able to move the arm to reach a target on the screen – at which point the team rewarded them with juice. …

The ability to share thought could enable us to solve complex problems. “Sometimes it’s really hard to collaborate if you are a mathematician and you’re thinking about very complex and abstract objects,” says Stocco. “If you could collaboratively solve common problems [using a brainet], it would be a way to leverage the skills of different individuals for a common goal.”

This research is at Duke University, in the lab of Dr. Nicolelis.

Fascinating stuff – although it makes me wonder if, in the future, being part of a team will be a far more intimate experience than I, perhaps, might find comfortable.  Kudos to those of you who immediately thought of author Keith Laumer.  However, if you can actually name the story, Retief’s Ransom, then perhaps you need to get out more.

When sixteen candidates are vying for any party’s Presidential nomination, the first requirement is understanding how to stand out from the crowd.  This can be a major problem because any decision may place you on the wrong side of some portion of the Party faithful, law, or tradition.  Take, for instance, Senator Marco Rubio.  Recent polling – relevant for big money donors and endorsements – shows him trailing front runners with only 6% (this HuffPo poll is interactive and recent enough for our purposes).  If you’re a young, inexperienced Senator, with few legislative accomplishments, you have to get the voters’ attention, so you decide to show how independent you are – of President Obama.  Courtesy The Washington Post:

“This is not America’s deal with Iran. It is Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, and it does not have congressional support,” [Rubio] said. “It is the duty of Congress to protect American security, not follow what President Obama has described as the ‘broad international consensus.’”

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

Governor Scott Walker went a similar route:

[Walker] said he would “terminate the bad deal with Iran on the very first day in office, put in place crippling sanctions and convince our allies to do the same.”

(The Weekly Standard, h/t Joan McCarter @ The Daily Kos)

This despite praise from the experts; only those with a political iron in the fire are upset.  Even the US public is in favor.  But, most importantly, besides this being Congressional meddling in foreign policy, which is traditionally the realm of the Executive, this (as Steve Benen also points out) is also a threat to the credibility of American foreign policy in the eyes of the world.  If we are to retain any sort of respectable world leadership role, we must maintain a consistent foreign policy; abrupt shifts tied to American elections will lead to disrespect and more usages of that filthy phrase, boots on the ground.  The GOP should know this, so this is another example of prioritizing Party over country.

Governor Jeb Bush has decided to do away with Medicare:

“I think a lot of people recognize that we need to make sure we fulfill the commitment to people that have already received the benefits, that are receiving the benefits. But that we need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others and move to a new system that allows them to have something — because they’re not going to have anything,” Bush said.

(ThinkProgress)

I suppose this qualifies as leadership, since Medicare is the second most important program provided by the government:

(The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation)

Leadership is recognizing an issue, getting everyone’s attention, and leading the way on resolving it.  However, just doing away with the program may not be a solution, but a red flag for the base of the GOP.  Bush is responding to fellow candidate and Senator Paul Ryan’s proposal to privatize Medicare, which the Fiscal Times explains:

Under the Ryan plan, in 2024, those turning 65 would be offered a spate of private health plans through a “Medicare exchange.” Coverage through the exchanges would be guaranteed and premiums would be paid for or subsidized through the government, depending on the cost of the plan. Those born before 1959 would remain in the existing Medicare system.

Donald Trump joins the game by denigrating immigrants and John McCain.

The GOP candidates are being forced, by sheer numbers, to ramble further and further afield in their differentiation attempts – and because the pasture is only so big, they are now beginning to attempt to scale the forbidden cliffs of outlawry – and they ain’t Alpine Ibex:

(Image courtesy Wikipedia)

They’re also in pursuit of the base of their Party, which appears to be shrinking, as noted in a previous post:

While still dominant, its shrinkage within the confines of the GOP may also suggest it’s shrinking throughout the population.  A GOP paying the piper to win the nomination may not have the coin of the realm – credibility with moderates – to win a general Presidential election.  Right at the moment, with lots of time to remand their approach, Gallup suggests they are not doing well:

Given that the Presidential candidates are the face of the Party, we can guess that the non-Republican portion of the electorate is not finding the candidates favorable.  Perhaps the more moderate candidates are basing their hopes on that logic?  Venerable FiveThirtyEight‘s Harry Enten lists the four most moderate candidates as, in order, Pataki, Kasich, Christie, and Bush.  The first three don’t break 4% – while Bush is one of the front-runners, he feels forced to scale the cliffs of notoriety.  Given the continued death grip of the most conservative wing of the party on the GOP, I suspect this is hopeless.  Perhaps all these four have going for them is Executive experience.

But another motivating force is, ironically, one of the strengths of the present Party – an ideological purity on a set of central questions: thou will be against Obamacare or any single-payer health system (we’ll not mention that the Republicans actually pioneered the concept in Massachusetts), Iran is always evil, evil, evil and must be bombed, unions are always evil, gay Republicans can’t exist … etc.  When you can’t openly disagree on the central tenets of the Party, either through decree or because you can see the bulging eyes of your base every time you think about it, well, you have to go hunting new goats issues & positions – even if they’re akin to outlawry.

If the GOP gets the boot in the 2016 elections, it’ll be interesting to see if the conservative wing is excommunicated, or if the conservative wing simply performs a ceremonial version of cannibalism as they blame each other for their failures.

The Arts Editor goes a step further concerning her next car purchase:

I would buy one of those. Corvette Stealth. In 1950’s styling. Maybe in British racing green with an off-white inset.

In this climate, no less, she wants a convertible with no mass.  We be spinnin’, mahn.

My Arts Editor and I were talking the other day about electric cars when one of these went by:

And she nodded and said, “They should make those electric.  Except they should look like …”

“All fiberglass, aluminum chassis – they’d sell like hotcakes.”

(Images courtesy AutoBlog and ViewLiner, Ltd Car Gurus)

The reader responds on this thread:

It may be an “ethic” but not many people are really self-made. Society helps them out in numerous ways. Donald Trump wasn’t a homeless orphan who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He instead worked for his millionaire father and attended the best schools, etc.

Society helps everyone, although unequally; I think the real point is that most are where they are due to family – and I meant that both positively and negatively, unfortunately.

And the other point is perhaps “myth” would have been a better word – true or not, this country was founded on the belief that a hard worker can improve themselves.

Last time we wrote on this thread, both I and my correspondent were disconsolate over the state of the world.  So it’s interesting how reading a short review of three books in NewScientist (4 July 2015, paywall) by Fred Pearce:

In On The Edge, Claude Martin, former director of environmental group WWF International, remembers that back in the 1980s, forest biologists like him warned that the loss of pristine rainforests was driving tens of thousands of species to extinction. Yet it wasn’t so. His magisterial review of the state of those forests concedes that the “pessimistic projections”, which assumed that species would be lost as fast as forest area, have proved false.

Most species in these habitats survive even in the face of rampant deforestation. Puerto Rico lost 99 per cent of its primary forests but just seven bird species, and today has more species than before, he says. And thanks in part to reseeding by alien species, old forests are starting to grow again. …

Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, can also see the light in unexpected places. Nearly a decade ago, in The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, he cast fighting climate change as a trillion-dollar challenge that required shared economic sacrifices today to save our children from wild weather and rising tides in the future.

Now, he writes, the need for “burden-sharing” is passing. Clean technologies are often as cheap as burning fossil fuels: “Much of what is necessary on the low-carbon front is also very good for growth, development and poverty reduction.” …

In End Game, academics Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly eloquently lay out the ecological perils we face, deftly showing how they might segue into food and water shortages, disease, resource wars and mass migrations. “Life would go on, but there would be a lot more losers than winners,” they write. But they, too, conjure good news from the crisis. Their subtitle, “Tipping point for planet Earth?”, refers not just to nature’s potential implosion under human assault, but also to positive tipping points in human responses.

Like nature, we can fight what once seemed inevitable. As the authors explain, family sizes have become radically smaller, defusing population bombs; rich societies are reaching “peak stuff” as people spend spare cash on “experiences rather than things”; agriculture can become far more efficient; and recycling can both end pollution and stem resource shortages.

Maybe it was the fact that I was sitting at a drive-in movie theater when I read this tri-book review, but I found it refreshing and that feeling of gloom ‘n doom at the back of my mind went away for a while.  The emotional reaction to learning that Nature is flexible enough to recover and continue from most of our assaults is interesting, and also a refreshing counterpoint to the Pope’s recent lament concerning our poor stewardship of the planet – which is to say, we can kill ourselves off and Nature Life will continue.

Religious considerations aside, a moral system for agnostics & atheists must deal, in a most fundamental way, with the question of Life: is it worth living?  Does it have inherent value?  If we accept an absolutist position that life is valuable, what are we to make of prey / predator relationships?  How about overpopulation situations, where cannibalism (amongst rats) is observed?

Without answering those questions here, I at least affirm a moderate position on life – not human life, but all life.  Noting that life consumes life as a natural evolution of life, I also note cross-species affection – humans and their pets, elephants and dogs, horses and cats are all well-known examples.  To believe that Life will survive, with or without humanity, is something … to live for.

Iran appears to be trying to reassure critics that the deal is right for it, according to Arash Karami at AL Monitor:

On Iran’s foreign policy after the deal, [foreign policy advisor to Khamenei, Ali Akbar] Velayati said, “Iran’s policies will not change under any conditions. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s support of regional fighters in the path of resistance will be the same as it was — rather, it will be strengthened. The Islamic Republic of Iran is determined to help the government and people of Iraq in the fight against terrorism, whether they be extremist terrorists or moderate — to use an American phrase — terrorists.” He added, “Iran will not hesitate to help the people of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.”

Velayati said that Iran would have never signed a “bad deal,” which according to him would take away its nuclear program, limit its research and development, impact Iran’s defensive capabilities, prevent Iran’s free exchange with world economies and deprive the country of scientific and technological relationships.

The interview, which was the top story on Khamenei’s personal website, appeared to be aimed at reassuring critics of the nuclear deal who say that it will limit Iran’s missile program or change Iran’s regional policy.

AL Monitor‘s Mazal Mualem is outraged at the behavior of the Israeli media, not to mention the Knesset:

From the moment the agreement was signed July 14, the Israeli public only heard one-sided commentary on the deal’s implications. The key personage who set the tone was, of course, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared that the agreement paves Iran’s way to the atom bomb. But even the heads of the opposition parties, Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, also took part in the effort. They lambasted the agreement as threatening to Israel, and targeted Netanyahu as being responsible for the debacle. Lapid even demanded a national commission of inquiry to investigate the failures in foreign policy that led to the bad agreement (in his words). “We thought it would be a bad agreement, but it is even worse than we expected,” Lapid said. …

Even former Mossad head Efraim Halevy, who has long maintained that Iran does not constitute an existential threat to the State of Israel, presented on Israeli state radio a more balanced view regarding the deal. At the margins of the public discourse can also be heard the statements of Amos Yadlin, the former chief of defense intelligence, and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. All of these voices seemed to try to dampen the national panic.

Both Israel’s Netanyahu and the United States’ GOP have hinted, or even outright called for, attacks on Iran in order to destroy the nuclear facilities.  Israel’s Shai Feldman, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Ariel Levite suggest the ongoing failure of the use of force make the deal inevitable in “Seven Realities That Made an Iran Deal Almost Inevitable”:

The third reality comprised the broader context of the second: a growing skepticism about the utility of force in the twenty-first century. This skepticism was bred not only by a stream of U.S. failures to achieve political goals through military means in Iraq and Afghanistan (and by Israel in both Lebanon and Gaza) but also by a growing appreciation that such use of force often results in unintended consequences. Indeed, as in the case of Iraq, such consequences could prove even more ominous than the challenges that led to the use of force in the first place. Interestingly, President Obama is not the only relevant leader who shares such skepticism. Measured not by his rhetoric but by his behavior in all military confrontations during his terms as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has apparently grown no less skeptical about the use of force and sensitive to its potential downsides, causing him to be historically among the most cautious of Israeli leaders. The result is that both Obama and Netanyahu found it very difficult to project a credible military threat that could have produced effective leverage in the negotiations with Iran.

And Iran is bringing other weapons to bear in this fight, although the precise target of this one is somewhat unclear.  AL Monitor has the report:

Vocativ, an online media company that uses data-mining technology to report stories trending in social media, reported that as the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna headed into the 11th hour, former underground rapper Amir Tataloo and his new song, “Energy Hastei,” which means “Nuclear Energy” in Persian, was the top Google search in Tehran. …

Tataloo’s new video is prefaced with a brief message that reads, “No power can prevent the Iranian nation from having peaceful nuclear energy.” Dressed in light camouflage with an “Allah” necklace around his neck, the rapper’s initial verse is laced with passive-aggressive lyrics that he indirectly links to themes throughout the video: nationalism, defending Iranian sovereignty and Iran’s nuclear energy program. As he sings the chorus, “Having an armed Persian Gulf is our absolute right,” the rapper stands provocatively atop the Iranian Navy warship, Damavand, joined by a stone-faced unit of Iranian soldiers on the ship’s deck. …

Despite the buzz on social media and a handful of mostly hard-line Iranian news sites, there was a distinctive silence about the video in the Iranian press. The Twitter account of the ultra-conservative website Mashregh News fired off a number of promotional tweets about the video, including a link where fans can download the audio file for free.

A reader responds to behavioral economics:

Once again proving that helping the poor and working classes is cheaper than trying to solve the downstream societal problems. And yes, that means ultimately cheaper for the 1% too.

I suspect the American ethic of “by your bootstraps” gets in the way of solving certain problems, particularly in the societal/behavioral realm.

Treehugger‘s Christine Lepisto is reporting on the confirmation of a predicted particle called the Weyl fermion:

With an intricate structure reminiscent of the deep carvings in the Hagia Sophia, the engineered crystal pictured above may go down in history as one of the wonders of our generation. The amazing structure, based on a mathematical surface known as a “gyroid” was built from crystallized tantalum arsenide using modern manufacturing techniques.

Gizmag is also on the ball:

Weyl fermions were first mooted in 1929 by physicist and mathematician Hermann Weyl, who theorized that massless fermions able to carry an electric charge could exist. Without mass, he believed, electrons created from Weyl fermions would be able to move electric charge in a circuit much more quickly than ordinary electrons. In fact, according to this latest research, electric current carried by Weyl electrons in a test medium is able to move at least twice as fast as that carried by electrons in graphene and at least 1,000 times faster than in ordinary semiconductors.

IEEE Spectrum adds some details:

The researchers noted these Weyl fermions are not freestanding particles. Instead, they are quasiparticles that can only exist within those crystals. In other words, they are electronic activity that behaves as if they were particles in free space. By shining beams of ultraviolet light and X-rays at these crystals, the researchers detected the telltale effects of Weyl fermions on those beams.

So if they can get them out of their crystals, maybe Moore’s Law has a chance of carrying on for a while.

Of course, the real fun comes in finding out what else can be done with them.

Behavioral economics mixes the rationality of economics with the semi-rationality of the human brain. This Harvard Magazine article by Cara Feinberg covers the work of Professor Sendhil Mullainathan, who works on studies of how scarcity affects the mind:

In 2008, Mullainathan joined Eldar Shafir, Tod professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, to write a book exploring these questions. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) presented years of findings from the fields of psychology and economics, as well as new empirical research of their own. Based on their analysis of the data, they sought to show that, just as food had possessed the minds of the starving volunteers in Minnesota, scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hungry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor. …

“To put it crudely,” he explains, “poverty—no matter who you are—can make you dumber.”To prove it, they planned to administer Raven’s Progressive Matrices tests (essentially IQ tests that measure skills without requiring experience or expertise) to their subjects. Just before taking the test, subjects were asked to consider a hypothetical scenario:

Imagine you’ve got car trouble and repairs cost $300. Your auto insurance will cover half the cost. You need to decide whether to go ahead and get the car fixed,or take a chance and hope that it lasts for a while longer. How would you make this decision? Financially, would it be easy or hard?

Using self-reported household income, the researchers split the subjects into groups of “rich” and “poor.” When they tallied their scores on the Raven’s Matrices, there was no statistically significant difference in the groups’ performance.

But in a second version of the test, researchers raised the price tag for the repairs to $3,000. Although rich people’s test scores showed no significant difference, the poor people’s scores dropped the equivalent of about 14 IQ points: the difference between the categories of “superior” and “average” intelligence—or more pointedly, from “average” to “borderline deficient.” That’s a greater deficit than subjects in sleep studies typically show after staying awake for 24 hours, Mullainathan and Shafir highlight. “Simply raising monetary concerns for the poor,” they explain, “erodes cognitive performance even more than being seriously sleep deprived.” …

Scientists spend vast resources developing medications, water-purifying technologies, financial products, and social services designed to help people in need, he explains. But getting people to use these technologies also requires understanding the psychology of the people using them. Policymakers, he says, must make this type of research a priority.

Great article. It would seem like good policy to use these findings when building programs to help the poor.  But I have to consider this: sometimes these policies implement changes in the way these folks run their lives, and this may be resented.  Regardless of the fascination of these findings, their implementation will be difficult simply because most folks like to run their lives their way.

And apparently scarcity is not a particular synonym for poverty – a scarcity of time can also affect you, causing poor time management decisions to be made when the condition becomes chronic.

… with a scale of approximately 1:10²⁰⁰⁰.

Just a guess.

Here it is.

(h/t NewScientist 4 July 2015)

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not entirely happy with the nuclear deal, reports AL Monitor‘s Arash Karami in an interview with the IRGC’s head, Mohammad Ali Jafari:

“For me, as a military official, what is more important than anything else … is the protection and promotion of Iran’s defensive abilities.”

On the agreement that the Security Council voted on, Jafari said, “Some points included in the draft [are] clearly contrary to and a violation of the red lines of the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically of Iran’s arms capabilities and will never be accepted by us.” He continued, “Any resolution that contradicts our country’s red lines, there is no validity, and we are hopeful that the [UN Security Council] does not waste its time to pass a draft like this.”

Jafari did not say that how he or the IRGC would oppose the aspects of the nuclear deal that he objects to.

While the IRGC does not have a formal responsibility to sign or repudiate the deal, they remain a major force in Iranian political life and could scuttle the agreement.

In Israel, a political opponent of current Prime Minister Netanyahu, former Labor Party Minister Ephraim Sneh, happens to agree with his opponent that this is a bad deal, in another AL Monitor interview:

It is full of holes. First of all, the inspection protocols are very problematic, because they give the Iranians 24 days to prepare. That’s enough time to hide and conceal what they have been doing. After all, they are masters of deception. They’ve spent years deceiving the entire world, so they don’t need more than 24 hours to hide any accumulated evidence. In other words, the inspections aren’t real inspections.

Second, the nuclear project was not dismantled. It was put on hold. It was frozen, and anything frozen can be unfrozen. The Iranians don’t see their strategy in terms of winning the next elections. They look at it in generational and historical terms. They consider domination of the region and of the entire world for that matter as a historic objective, rather than some concrete objective in the here and now. In that sense, another 10 or 15 years is not a lot of time.

The third thing is that the clause regarding the restoration of punitive measures will become impractical in the new reality that will emerge the moment sanctions are lifted. Why? Because who will be the first people to go running to Tehran to do business there? Large corporations. Once they have contractual ties with the Revolutionary Guards or some proxy for the Revolutionary Guards, their government will not take any steps against Iran, because doing so would involve money and jobs. It would involve economic interests. That is why that whole argument is untrustworthy.

Masters of deception, eh?  This argument has the ring of speciousness about it, no doubt due to the hyperbolic rhetoric.  They may be devious, but the West has decades of monitoring experience – and a very bloody history of our own.

The second argument has a similar rhetorical problem – dominate the world?  Secondly, he ignores the very important fact that knowledge is dependent on the scientists.  A frozen nuclear project will, in fact, and if you’ll pardon the pun, decay as the scientists stop working on it and go on to other things, retire, and die.  Even the physical infrastructure will decay.  There is more to unfreezing a high-tech project than simply snapping your fingers.

The third argument is also dubious, although somewhat less so.  But I do feel that Iran will be protectionist, so the number of large corporations with large investments will initially be close to zero; as time passes, this will become less true, but we’ll have gained experience with the Iranians, and they with us.  I think we can hope as the two sides settle into the agreement, they will each appreciate the positives of a peaceful relationship, and the negatives of slinging nuclear explosives at each other.

Nonetheless, Sneh knows a lot more about his corner of the world than do I.

Longtime Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has this to say, as reported by the Daily Star of Lebanon:

“The nuclear deal between Iran and world powers is the result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq… and the corpses of the Syrian people,” the party chief said in his weekly column in Al-Anbaa online newspaper. “It was signed with the blood of the hundreds of thousands who fell in [the process] of paving of the road for the agreement.”

However, the report goes on to say Lebanese officials welcome the deal.  AL Monitor brings more flavor to Jumblatt’s statement:

For Jumblatt, the nuclear deal between Iran and the West is akin to Sykes-Picot of 100 years ago that intended to carve the Ottoman-Arab lands with the decision of two Western colonial powers, the United Kingdom and France. The deal now reached between the West led by the United States and non-Arab Iran might have a similar effect on the Middle Eastern chessboard.

Wikipedia enlightens us as to Sykes–Picot:

The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France,^[1] with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916.^[2] The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916.^[3]

The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence.^[4] The terms were negotiated by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes. The Russian Tsarist government was a minor party to the Sykes–Picot agreement, and when, following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks exposed the agreement, “the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted.”^[5]

But this time around the Turks may not be so happy:

The first Turkish official reaction to the nuclear deal reached in Vienna on July 14 came from Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. He said, “Iran should be constructive, attaching importance to political dialogue. … Particularly, it [Iran] should reconsider its role in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.”

The spirit of his words obviously reflected the uneasiness of Turkey from the potential of Iran re-emerging as an international political actor that may overshadow its ambitious western neighbor.

“Constructive” and “attaching importance to political dialogue” can easily be interpreted as “talk to us, talk to Turkey, so we could feel as important ourselves.” As for the second part of his reaction, Cavusoglu means, “Turkey and Iran are pitted against each other from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, in Mesopotamia and the Levant. An Iran strengthened by the West will further undermine Turkey’s regional standing.”

Treehugger‘s Michael Graham Richard is jubilant:

This week [the Sierra Club is] celebrating a new milestone: The 200th U.S. coal plant retirement announcement since 2010. This is a huge deal, because in 2010 there were 535 coal plants in the country, so this is almost 40% of the fleet that is going away (and while it’s not always the biggest power plants that are retired, it’s usually the oldest and dirtiest ones).

Always good to hear, as coal plants are dirty power sources, emitting mercury along with the better known climate change gasses.  Nuclear power plants have declined slightly recently as reported by the government:

Four reactors were taken out of service in 2013: the Crystal River plant in Florida with one reactor in February; the Kewaunee plant in Wisconsin with one reactor in April; and the San Onofre plant in California with two reactors in June.  The Vermont Yankee plant in Vermont, with a single reactor, was taken out of service in December 2014.

The World Nuclear Association reports others are on the way, but economic headwinds make progress slow:

Despite a near halt in new construction of more than 30 years, US reliance on nuclear power has grown. In 1980, nuclear plants produced 251 billion kWh, accounting for 11% of the country’s electricity generation. In 2008, that output had risen to 809 billion kWh and nearly 20% of electricity, providing more than 30% of the electricity generated from nuclear power worldwide. Much of the increase came from the 47 reactors, all approved for construction before 1977, that came on line in the late 1970s and 1980s, more than doubling US nuclear generation capacity. The US nuclear industry has also achieved remarkable gains in power plant utilisation through improved refuelling, maintenance and safety systems at existing plants.

While there are plans for a number of new reactors (see section on Preparing for new build below), no more than four new units will come on line by 2020. Since about 2010 the prospect of low natural gas prices continuing for several years has dampened plans for new nuclear capacity.

Traditional hydroelectricity, aka dams, is also declining, as noted by American Rivers:

How many dams actually produce power?

FERC regulates approximately 2,300 hydroelectric producing dams. In addition, there are approximately 240 federal dams that produce hydroelectric power. Thus, there are a total of approximately 2,540 hydropower dams. …

Why are some dams being removed?

There has been a growing movement to remove dams where the costs – including environmental, safety, and socio-cultural impacts – outweigh the benefits – including hydropower, flood control, irrigation, or recreation – or where the dam no longer serves any useful purpose. The goal of removal can be multi-faceted, including restoring flows for fish and wildlife, reinstating the natural sediment and nutrient flow, eliminating safety risks, restoring opportunities for recreation, and saving taxpayer money. …

How many dams have been removed to date?

Currently, American Rivers is aware of almost 1,150 dams that have been removed over the past 100 years in this country. We are still in the process of gathering this data, so that figure continues to increase as more information becomes available. You can view an interactive map of all known U.S. dam removals.

HydroWorld.com provides several case studies of dam decommissioning here.  However, non-traditional hydropower may be growing.  One example is Lucid Energy, which provides systems for harvesting energy from surplus pressure present in city water mains:

Driven by the demand for reliable, cost-effective electricity, water- and energy-intensive industries, municipalities and agricultural irrigation districts worldwide can deploy our in-pipe hydropower system to generate millions of megawatt hours of renewable electricity from the water already flowing through their pipelines – without interrupting flow.

LucidPipe can operate across a wide range of flow conditions, volumes and velocities. The unique lift-based vertical axis spherical turbine design generates electricity by extracting excess head pressure from large diameter (24”-96”), gravity-fed water pipelines and effluent streams. To maximize electricity generation, several LucidPipe systems can be rapidly and easily installed into a single pipeline,* allowing operations to continue normally.

(h/t Discover Magazine July/August 2015)

Naturally, solar and wind are supplying more energy needs.  For example, and full disclosure, I do have an investment in these folks, SolarCity (along with Xcel Power of Minnesota) is now providing a new approach to solar energy: community solar gardens.

SolarCity’s new community solar program will develop a series of up to one-hundred 1MW(AC) community solar installations, or “gardens,” in Wright and Sherburne counties. SolarCity will then invite renters, low-income housing residents, schools, and others in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to enter subscriber agreements to purchase the solar power the gardens produce at a rate of 13 cents per kWh. For up to 25 years, Xcel Energy will credit the subscribers at a rate of 14.7 cents per kWh of electricity that is purchased from SolarCity through a solar garden subscriber agreement. The anticipated 11.5 percent savings will be immediate for subscribers, who will remain Xcel Energy customers.

SolarCity will develop, operate and own the gardens and expects to hire local installation and operations personnel to build the projects. The company plans to reserve the majority of the gardens’ residential allocations in order to give some of the 600,000 apartment renters in Minnesota [1] access to affordable solar power. Community solar can also appeal to homeowners who have heavily shaded or north-facing roofs or those who do not want to make an up-front financial investment in a rooftop system.

(h/t The Motley Fool‘s Justin Loiseau)

As important as environmentalist organizations have been, corporations themselves also often see the light.  While the political class remain bitterly divided on the importance of the environment, firms are beginning to move to preserve customers and, in point of fact, their very existence.  Politicians often seem to exist in their own little worlds, but companies butt up against reality every day – and some are beginning to make positive moves.

A mother responds to this thread:

While unwilling to pay for a subscription to the on-line periodical, I was able to read more by Michel Odent from other sources.

My thoughts about the article(s) are that caring for children, not just birthing them, rely on very basic behaviors and response.  When my child speaks, from his first sounds, my mind focused on his sounds, ignoring all other input.  We call it the “parental mind-wipe” at our house.  As his voice deepens with approaching maturity, the condition occurs less.  While not having read many Odent articles, my guess is that “traditional” roles for men at the time of birthing would be concentrated on keeping the birthing tent/hut safe from predators seeking the easy meal of a newborn or the exhausted mother.

This culture of censored behaviors may be giving rise to outlandish behaviors as a response to the constraints placed on normal feelings. When stressed people feel that the only safe way to experience their stresses and transitions is to medicate or wound themselves, we have stepped backward in evolution.

It does seem like every negative emotion might be a candidate for medication.  Mourning, for example.

My Arts Editor and I were discussing government system efficiency today.  The classic example, in my mind, is the Italian fascists: They made the trains run on time.  My Arts Editor insisted this made them efficient, and that having a single guy making decisions makes for efficient decisions, regardless of their moral achievements, or lack thereof.  I disagreed.

As a software engineer, I’ve been asked more than a few times to optimize a solution to a problem, and after a while you become aware that you must develop a philosophy of efficiency, which essentially asks the question what is efficiency?  Even in software this can be a question of importance: sure, I can make this activity go fast – but do you have concerns about scalability? About the impact on other processes on the computer?  Etc.  A narrow definition of the meaning of efficiency may lead to unanticipated consequences.  Because efficiency is generally considered a positive concept, there can be a blinder effect in which efficiency is pursued with little to no regard to the impact it may have on others

My response to the assertion that the Italian Fascists were efficient governors is to ask, what does it mean to govern?  What is the purpose of government?  To my mind, it’s self-perpetuation – the goal of government is to provide a society with the peace, stability, and stimulation necessary to induce the population to reproduce with enough surviving children to have a viable next generation.  (If someone asks about Art, or God, or whatever, my catch-all answer is “stimulation”.)

With a purpose of government, we can then talk about its efficiency, which is to say, how well does this system of government fulfill the general purpose of government?  There are a few points to keep in mind:

1. As populations change and, arguably, mature or evolve, expectations of the government may change as well.  Monarchies have lasted for centuries; today they are nearly extinct.
2. Technology greatly impacts the expectations of the populace.  As the population finds it has more free time, its expectations change.

Now we can talk about specific performance.  The Italian Fascists held power 1922 – 1945 (Mussolini was ousted in 1943, but the Party soldiered onward), at the end of which the Allies, with the aid of various insurgency groups defeated the Fascists.  One might comment that outside forces can hardly be considered fair, but the Italians had the not inconsiderable force of the German (Fascist) war machine on their side (Japanese aid was, on the other hand, inconsiderable).  Or one might argue that it is the responsibility of government to navigate the shoals of the outside world.

Mussolini had taken naked control of the government in 1925, and he and his Party exercised arbitrary control from then on.  He may, indeed, had a hand in making the trains run on time, but I must ask at what cost to the rest of the country?  And while I cannot supply an answer to the specific question, we may ask the general question, and answer it: did the arbitrary power wielded by Mussolini bring wealth and happiness to the Italians?

The Italians shot him to death.  He brought them War, aggression (the failed invasion of Ethiopia), and defeat.

The problem of efficient government is discovering a way to making everyone happy while keeping the tigers at bay, while being flexible enough to change as required.  Government can generate electricity very efficiently – at the expense of pollution.  Or we can put solar cells on everyone’s roof, which will not be in the least aesthetically pleasing – but might let us decommission most of our power plants.  Is that efficiency?

I think perhaps the best approach is terminological: the Italian Fascists may have come up with an efficient process, but in the end they were inefficient at the game of government.  Sometimes, in order to preserve a governmental system that provides a stable society that self-perpetuates, it’s necessary to sacrifice certain efficiencies.

Response from the Arts Editor:
I can’t take exception to the intent of the sentiments expressed above, but I question the terminology. I think my esteemed colleague is confusing “efficient” and “effective”. To be efficient, one only has to complete one’s tasks with alacrity, using the minimum amount of effort that is needed to accomplish one’s goal. Generally speaking, the larger the committee, the less efficient they are at completing their tasks, since everyone gets to have their say. It follows then, that a dictator is the most efficient decision maker, because his is the only voice in his process that matters. But while the decision-making process of a despot may make for a high level of efficiency, the decisions made may not be effective. They may, indeed, make a whole lot of folks angry enough to overthrow the dictator in question. And while a coup by the masses may indeed be very effective, I surmise that the event itself wouldn’t be too efficient.

Obstetrician Michel Odent suggests that we’re moving further and further away from natural childbirth because we’re simply too bright:

So thinking too much hinders birth?
Yes. The neocortex is highly developed in humans ‐ it allows us to do mathematics, use language, answer questions… It is the thinking brain. But in some situations, neocortical activity can suppress vital activity in our primitive brain. A woman in labour needs to be protected against all possible stimulation of her thinking brain, because giving birth is the business of primitive brain structures. It is a reduction of neocortical activity that makes birth possible in humans. …

From what we know about childbirth before the Neolithic revolution, it seems that women knew to protect themselves against neocortical stimulation – they would isolate themselves to give birth. Today, labouring women are culturally conditioned to think that they are unable to give birth by themselves, that a partner or an expert must be there. The problem is, they are unable to “let go” with others watching them.

So the result?

It has become culturally unacceptable to create the conditions that encourage a fast and easy birth, so right now it is impossible to balance the two. So we have to consider the implications: for how long can we go on not using such a key physiological function? We understand – particularly in the age of epigenetics – that when physiological functions are underused they can become weaker from generation to generation. I cannot see how we can stop this process. The most probable result is a future in which most people are born by caesarean section.

And if doctors become unavailable?  Will we even be able to have a “normal” birth?

If you’re in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area of Minnesota and enjoy experimental theater, I encourage you to consider the upcoming Minnesota Fringe Festival.  I and my lovely Arts Editor will be taking in a number of shows, depending on our stamina and schedules.  Our past experiences have ranged from execrable to amazed; perhaps yours will as well.