Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Faig Ahmed via Smithsonian Magazine.

Alberta, a primary source of fossil fuels in Canada, has announced plans, as reported by CBC News, to -slowly- move away from fossil fuels.

“Our goal is to become one of the world’s most progressive and forward-looking energy producers,” said Premier Rachel Notley. “We are turning the page on the mistaken policies of the past, policies that have failed to provide the leadership our province needed.”

Wind will be emphasized, carbon will be taxed.  The Canadian oilsands industry backs the move:

Steve Williams, CEO of Suncor, shared Edwards’ enthusiasm.

“This plan will make one of the world’s largest oil-producing regions a leader in addressing the climate change challenge,” he said.

But not everyone is a fan:

One of the few dissenting voices came from the opposition Wildrose Party.

Leader Brian Jean said Albertans face job losses and economic uncertainty.

“This new carbon tax will make almost every single Alberta family poorer, while accelerated plans to shut down coal plants will lead to higher power prices and further jobs losses,” he said in a news release.

The Wildrose website is here. Wikipedia characterizes Wildrose as “a conservative provincial political party”, but it’s not clear if they have an official policy vis a vis climate change.

The Edmonton Sun has a few more details:

* Close the Coal-Fired Plants: The plan calls for the province’s 18 coal-fired electricity plants to be shuttered by 2030 with two-thirds of their former generation replaced by renewable energy, mostly wind generation. Renewable energy is expected to make up 30 per cent of Alberta’s electricity generation by 2030.

* A Carbon Tax on Everyone: The plan introduces a carbon tax of $20 per tonne in 2017 increasing to $30 per tonne in 2018. Expected to raise $3 billion a year, the tax would mean the price of gas at the pump will jump by 4.7 cents per litre and home heating costs will rise by $320 per year by 2017 and $470 by 2018. Albertans will be eligible for some form of rebate.

* An Oilsands Emissions Cap: The government says it will introduce a 100-megatonne cap on emissions from the oilsands. With the current projects operated by oilsands energy producers producing 70 megatonnes, the government says the cap allows the industry to continue to grow while providing time for it to find new ways to reduce the per-barrel emissions of oil production.

* Methane: The plan proposes Alberta implement a methane reduction strategy to reduce emissions by 45 per cent from 2014 levels by 2025. The methane reduction would be achieved in collaboration with industry, environmental organizations and First Nations groups.

So it appears support from oilsands was achieved by not hurting them immediately.

(h/t Sami Grover @ Treehugger.com)

Or at least so I hope.  Context?  Oh, sure.  Right Wing Watch reports on major GOP Presidential candidates courting an organization which, frankly, sounds like it’s way off in left field.

Right field.  Sorry.

But to get [the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, leader of The Family Leader, a social conservative group], candidates must cater to an activist far the right of mainstream voters. Not only does Vander Plaats want to remove from office or defund the courts of judges who find in favor of marriage equality, he believes that anything, like gay marriage, that “goes against the law of nature” is by definition unconstitutional . He argues that the government is an institution of God and therefor its purpose is “to promote righteousness” and to apply “God’s principles and precepts.” He once warned that God might withdraw his blessing from America because of a Wiccan prayer at the Iowa state capitol.

It’s a dispiriting simply to contemplate the lack of historical awareness exhibited by anyone at all who pays attention to someone who’s making these sorts of statements.  I can’t help but note the symptoms of power-mongering in these statements:

1. Defund those courts whose interpretation of the law clashes with yours: I am more important than the law, so when the law fails me, I remove its support.  A failure to submit to the law is certainly a popular way to start a war; base it on religious precepts, and we’re all the way back to Henry VIII.
2. Relying on “laws of nature”, which, outside of science, are notoriously slippery and open to convenient definitions designed to benefit those who define them.  Once again, I am more important than any definition which doesn’t benefit me.  (And believe me, as a science groupy, you don’t want to try this argument using the science version of the laws of nature … because those laws include cannibalism, lesbianism, and self-fertilization, amongst the more common-place behaviors.)
3. Government is an institution of God … not this one.  The United States system of government is, in fact, an emphatic rejection of the very notion.  How do we know this?  It’s irrefutable: Divine Monarchies, such as Henry VIII’s and any number of other monarchies, from England to Japan, were the system of government handed down from heaven.  How do we know this?  The same way Bob thinks he knows it.  But he came late, and as we all know, God doesn’t make mistakes, so this must be Bob’s error.  In fact, a reasonable citizen might suspect Bob is grasping for power again.

The thought that a substantial number of people pay attention this this guy, rather than to important issues of justice, is too discouraging to contemplate; so, if only in self-defense, I’ll suppose, both for myself and for the self-respect of our brothers in Iowa, that these Presidential candidates haven’t a scad of the sense their mothers should have gifted them with and are pursuing the votes of every last voter, rather than addressing issues such as honesty and sobriety in American politics.

(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)

Speaking of laws which seem ridiculous in the face of advancing technology, Lawfare‘s Timothy Edgar cites American surveillance laws:

As it turns out, the widely-held theory that the NSA had figured out another way to obtain the data [concerning bulk collection of Internet metadata within the United States] – with less oversight – is correct.  According to a new document obtained under FOIA by New York Times reporter Charlie Savage:

The report explained that there were two other legal ways to get such data. One was the collection of bulk data that had been gathered in other countries, where the N.S.A.’s activities are largely not subject to regulation by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and oversight by the intelligence court.  . . .

The N.S.A. had long barred analysts from using Americans’ data that had been swept up abroad, but in November 2010 it changed that rule, documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden have shown. The inspector general report cited that change to the N.S.A.’s internal procedures.

The other replacement source for the data was collection under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which permits warrantless surveillance on domestic soil that targets specific noncitizens abroad, including their new or stored emails to or from Americans.

Mr. Edgar concludes:

The lawfulness of bulk collection and applicable privacy rules should not depend on the technical details of the NSA’s collection – such as where the data is collected and exactly what fields are obtained – that have nothing to do with the privacy interests involved.  But this is exactly how the law works today.  Savage’s piece is a further reminder of just how incoherent our surveillance laws have become.

In other words, your privacy is at risk if your Internet sojourns take your data streams out of the United States, which, when put that way, have a certain poetic propriety which I find appealing, for, with the exception of certain diplomatic personnel, an American in another country is not immune to the laws of that country, but subject to them.  Nevertheless, Mr. Edgar’s comments are of a more serious nature.

With regard to location, it’s an interesting question – when your data stream is outside the United States, can an agency forbidden from collecting data about you ignore that law?  I’m no lawyer, so I can only claim that it seems like common sense to say the answer should be ‘No’ – as the implications of the statement is that a goal is denied to the NSA, not a method.

With regard to the fields collected, I’m not certain this is a technicality so much as it defines the issue.  How about anonymous collection of metadata?  Is that illegal?  I suppose I’m not up enough on the controversy to understand the implications at question.

Nor can I think of analogous situations from pre-Internet era.

More at Fran Rubia’s site.

NewScientist gives a longish article (“Police forces turn to science to put their tactics on trial“, 7 November 2015, paywall) on reforming police practices to be more like, well, conventional medicine – that is, evidence based:

For thousands of years, law enforcers have trusted their intuition and instincts. But one in every 26 police efforts to reduce crime actually have the effect of increasing crime, says Lawrence Sherman, director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. “To do things without knowing the consequences is to act unethically,” he says.

Only one in 26?  Is that a typo?  3.8 percent of efforts backfire?  I am not appalled by that statistic.  I also suspect he was quoted slightly out of context, as a literal reading of his quote would ban all experimentation.

Now, new police officers across the UK will be taught how to understand and implement scientific evidence in policing, and how to run their own experiments and trials – made possible in part by a £10 million injection of cash from the UK government and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The US has also begun to push for a more scientific approach to policing with the recent launch of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing (ASEBP).

Early results from several trials show that some common police practices are ineffective, or even harmful, while others highlight ways to ensure that people are all treated fairly.

Despite my earlier comment, this is actually good news.  For a past example of a semi-random policy implemented by police, consider the New York City Guiliani-era “broken windows” policy, as defined and examined by The National Bureau of Economic Research:

During the 1990s, crime rates in New York City dropped dramatically, even more than in the United States as a whole. Violent crime declined by more than 56 percent in the City, compared to about 28 percent in the nation as whole. Property crimes tumbled by about 65 percent, but fell only 26 percent nationally.

Many attribute New York’s crime reduction to specific “get-tough” policies carried out by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration. The most prominent of his policy changes was the aggressive policing of lower-level crimes, a policy which has been dubbed the “broken windows” approach to law enforcement. In this view, small disorders lead to larger ones and perhaps even to crime. As Mr. Guiliani told the press in 1998, “Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”

In Carrots, Sticks and Broken Windows (NBER Working Paper No. 9061), co-authors Hope Corman and Naci Mocan find that the “broken windows” approach does not deter as much crime as some advocates argue, but it does have an effect, particularly on robbery and motor vehicle theft. They use misdemeanor arrests as a measure of broken windows policing.

Over the 1990s, misdemeanor arrests increased 70 percent in New York City. When arrests for misdemeanors had risen by 10 percent, indicating increased use of the “broken windows” method, robberies dropped 2.5 to 3.2 percent, and motor vehicle theft declined by 1.6 to 2.1 percent. But this decline was not the result of more of those involved in misdemeanors being incapacitated from further crimes by being in prison: prison stays for misdemeanors are short and only 9.4 percent of misdemeanor arrests result in a jail sentence, the authors note. Furthermore, an increase in misdemeanor arrests has no impact on the number of murder, assault, and burglary cases, the authors finds.

Their research is important because such policies, regardless of efficacy, are touted by their promulgators as their credentials for other political offices; evaluation of results is important.  But that’s not the point of the NewScientist article; the researchers want to conduct small field studies which can then be analyzed to create policies used nation-wide that they have good reason to believe will be effective.

There’ll be resistance from established power structures, I should think, based on protecting power and privilege, but for those who are more idealistic, learning how to properly construct field trials and interpret resultant statistics to give a final evaluation to a proposed new policy will be a critical component of this approach.

In some ways, I see this as an extension of the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment was about the use of reason, of rationality, when pursuing, in barest essence, questions about courses of action.  Back then, they were more concerned about politics and science – has the king been selected by God, or just why should he be obeyed?  The use of observation and reasoning to discover that water could be the source of disease, and then that disease is caused by germs, and not malevolent daemons.  But the use of statistical methods have come later to some fields; indeed, the very term evidence-based medicine is somewhat shocking in the implications that some activities that bill themselves as medicine not only lack any sort of evidence as to their efficacy, but may bill themselves as effective due to effects not supported by science itself.

Evidence-based policing may not have the same outré implications, but the existence of the term (and associated supporting organization, mentioned above) does serve to remind us that one of the most critical functions of government may not have benefited as much, in terms of ideal efficiency, as has other sectors of society.  Recent unrest between community and law enforcement in Ferguson, MO, have served to stir up calls for reform of law enforcement, but popular calls for reform neglect to precisely specify what makes for effective reform.  Will a similar, evidence-based effort for police reform be available to those who are eventually handed the task?  Or will we merely hope the recipients of the task have the wisdom, acquired from who knows where, to reform organizations possessing woes the origin of which are not formally researched and recognized – i.e., the Great Man approach to solving problems.

As (to borrow a phrase from my sister) a story-junkie, there’s great attraction in the Great Man approach, but as a science groupy, I must deride that inclination and hope someone has done the necessary, arduous (or an even stronger adjective) research to discover how to best reform a police organization.  Otherwise, we can only hope someone gets it right.

The buried ocean of Europa may not require drilling if NewScientist‘s report (7 November 2015, paywall) is accurate:

Observations from the Galileo spacecraft, which visited the Jupiter system in the 1990s, found that the moon hosts an ocean covered in water ice. Sulphur and oxygen from volcanoes on the nearby moon Io also fall onto Europa’s surface, where they combine to make magnesium sulphate. Now a new analysis has found an unidentified material that only shows up in fractured terrain. This could mean the buried ocean is breaching the surface.

The spectrum, or chemical signature, of the material has so far defied identification. “It looks like the spectrum of water ice except that it’s distorted,” says Patrick Fischer at the California Institute of Technology. The team hasn’t been able to reproduce it using a library of known chemicals – although they can rule out sulphates, which researchers expected to see.

One possibility is an unknown blend of potassium or sodium chloride. This would mean these regions are salt flats left behind when ocean water burbled up and then evaporated (Astronomical Journal, in press). “We can guess that the spectrum we’re seeing is probably evaporate deposits of salt left over from the ocean,” Fischer says.

Just land and scoop.  And take off.  And fly back.

OK, not that easy.

NewScientist is plenty mad at the UK’s current government as described in the 7 November 2015 leader.  After a lovely rant about some nonsensical proposed bill dubbed the “snooper’s charter”, as promoted by the Brits’ spooks, they turn to some other amateurish bills:

The government also seems to think it can legislate chemistry. Its Psychoactive Substances Bill proposes to ban any substance that alters mental state. Taken at face value, that’s everything from chocolate to flowers. As the deep absurdity of this has sunk in, the government has drafted a list of exempt substances. Homeopathic pills will be on it, we are assured: caffeine products are fine, too, as long as they contain both caffeine and, somehow, “no psychoactive substance”.

This pattern of ill-conceived pledges followed by impractical legislation looks ominously as though it will be repeated in energy and education. That suggests the government is either scientifically illiterate or believes it can get its way by assuming its citizens are. Perhaps it can. Its ideological stances on terrorism and drugs may win wide support even if they don’t make sense.

With a painful grin, we again encounter the conundrum of the amateur legislators – the immensely complex task of governance handed to those who have little training or experience.  The sad part, of course, is that there’s plenty of scientific expertise available for issues such as those animating NewScientist is this editorial.  The UK government should be bright enough to at least ask for help when confronted with very complex issues such as counter-espionage, regulation of new recreational drugs, and many other fundamentally technological issues.

As a non-Brit not living in the UK, I have to wonder if the governing Conservatives are permitting ideology to come before reality.

NewScientist (31 October 2015, paywall) reports exciting news, if you’re a rat:

A drug called montelukast (Singulair), regularly prescribed for asthma and allergic rhinitis, blocks these receptors, so Aigner and his colleagues tested it on young and old rats. The team used oral doses equivalent to those taken by people with asthma. The older animals were 20 months old – perhaps between 65 and 75 in human years. The younger rats were 4 months old – roughly the equivalent of 17 human years. The animals were fed the drug daily for six weeks, while another set of young and old rats were left untreated. There were 20 young and 14 old rats in total.

The rats took part in a range of learning and memory tests. One of these involved the rats being placed in a pool of water with a hidden escape platform. At the start of the study, untreated young rats learned to recognise landmarks and quickly find their way to the platform, while the untreated older animals struggled at the task.

By the end of their six-week drug regime, though, old animals performed as well as their younger companions. “We restored learning and memory 100 per cent, to a level comparable with youth,” says [Ludwig] Aigner [at Paracelsus Medical University Salzburg in Austria]. He presented his findings earlier this month at the Neuroscience 2015 meeting in Chicago.

You’d think an affect on humans would have been reported, though.

“I wanna leave some money with the purser,” says the disappearing new husband in Dangerous Crossing (1953), leaving Ruth Stanton, heiress and former mental patient, due to overwhelming grief, to ponder his whereabouts.  In this tense, yet surprisingly forgettable drama, the four stack ocean liner continues on its appointed path, unswayed by the unbalanced doings of the critters that happen to inhabit it, a metaphor of the underlying reality which Ruth is trying to discern.  Perhaps she didn’t really marry?  Her maiden name is in the ship’s roster, much to her distress; her husband’s luggage, gone; the ship’s officers express skepticism, nay, they even express alcohol and drugs, so to speak, as a remedy for her trauma.

And then – her husband calls.

Such is the nature of reality, as any physicist will tell you.  One moment, you think you understand just what those quarks will do, and the next thing you know, the quarks are doing a gnarly wave through a slit and you’re left with your eyeballs starting from their sockets, trying to understand how something can be two things at once.

The danger is great, both physicists and the husband express.  The ship’s doctor, he of the rugged countenance and pragmatic care policies, expresses concern until, in a schizophrenic turn, slaps her in a barbaric attempt to reorient her to reality, as if he has a firm grip on this most slippery of concepts!  But no!

It’s another phone call!  She clings to her version of reality, whether it be sane or not; the doctor, impossibly tall and good looking, insists on medicating her some more.

And then, the climax, as the doctor wrestles with the villain of the piece, the wastrel younger brother of the now-deceased father …. behind whose face did he conceal himself??

Much like old, misbegotten phlogiston theory, the movie wallows with obsolete tropes concerning the weakness of the female of the species, and this hurts what is otherwise a tense, well-thought out drama.  True, it doesn’t have the engaging chemistry and patter of the old classic The Thin Man, but there is certainly some slight charm, better pacing than some movies of the ’50s, and if you permit yourself to be pulled in, the questions begin piling up as the story-telling deceit builds to a good, if not great, climax.

We all know Hollywood would insert some horrid love story if they were to do it today.  Bodies would pile up, and we’d see it in exquisite detail.  A movie in which certain unpleasant subjects are merely referenced has a certain charm and clarity lost, sometimes, in modern movies.

To put an exclamation point on the importance of bees, NewScientist (31 October 2015, paywall) is now reporting using them for spreading anti-pathogens:

The idea involves placing a tray of organic pesticide powder inside a commercially bred hive. The powder contains a substance to help it stick to bees’ legs and a strain of Clonostachys rosea fungus that is harmless to these insects but attacks crop diseases and pests. “It’s a perfectly natural fungus found very commonly throughout the world. We’ve just developed a way to grow and harvest it efficiently,” says Michael Collinson, CEO of BVT.

The bumblebees walk through the powder as they leave the hive. When they land on flowers to gather nectar and pollen, they leave a dusting of pesticide to protect the plant and future fruit.

Many crops can be protected this way, including blueberries and bell peppers. BVT plans to provide its dispensing system to a number of companies that have developed biological controls for other pests such as fireblight, which affects apples and pears. “Farmers usually spray the whole orchard and 99 per cent of it ends up in the wrong place,” says Collinson. “We can deliver it locally and use 20 grams as opposed to 2 kilograms. It’s much better for the environment.”

I wonder if application only in those areas is effective against all pathogens.

A reader expresses incredulity about the booze:

Your final number is still 60% of the total population, not adults. I’m pretty sure that the percentage of drinkers under say age 14 is a fraction of 1%. So the final number per drinker is much higher.

But I always wonder about these kinds of estimates. If alcohol costs the U.S. $249 billion and tobacco costs $X billion and “danger Y” costs $Z billion, etc., what happens if you add up all those estimates, and discover they’re larger than the GDP or total wages paid or something like that? Which I suspect it would, instantly putting the lie to the estimates.

It would certainly explain our low savings rate, although at least it isn’t negative, as explained here by the St. Louis Fed Blog.

… courtesy the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera.

From The Journal of Preventive Medicine (November 2015):

Excessive drinking cost the U.S. $249.0 billion in 2010, or about $2.05 per drink. Government paid for $100.7 billion (40.4%) of these costs. Binge drinking accounted for $191.1 billion (76.7%) of costs; underage drinking $24.3 billion (9.7%) of costs; and drinking while pregnant $5.5 billion (2.2%) of costs. The median cost per state was $3.5 billion. Binge drinking was responsible for >70% of these costs in all states, and >40% of the binge drinking–related costs were paid by government.

Doing a little math here … US population in 2010 was 309.34 millions (courtesy a pastiche of data by Google) … so … divide the cost by the population to get … $804 per capita … and that, of course, is on the undifferentiated US population.  I, for example, have two-three glasses of wine per annum, no beer or other liquors.  I’m somewhat leary of counting children out of this study, though.  PopSugar.com reports on an National Center for Health Statistics study:

Six out of 10 adults drink alcohol, while nearly 25 percent responded that they were lifetime abstainers. Men are more likely to list themselves as current drinkers than women.

For our napkin math, we’ll go with the 60% figure, so 60% of 309.34 is 185.604 millions, changing our answer to … $1341, give or take.

Well, I thought $249 billion in booze damage was a little crazy, but broken down to a per drinker calculation, it’s not out of line.  Heart breaking, maybe, having lost my maternal grandparents to alcoholism and smoking, but not surprising.

(h/t NewScientist 24 October 2015)

On deck is a classic, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a film exposing the ugly underside of human greed, and its associate, the free market.  The Joads, having lost the farm they rented during the Great Depression, are forced to search for work.  We see them forced from the land, their house destroyed by the landowner’s minions and enforced by the police, as son Tom (Henry Fonda) returns from prison, having killed a man and served his time.  Being tenant farmers, they have little right to the land they’ve worked for generations, nor do they have little other in the way of skills, and we see the human cost of ‘creative destruction’ – Grandpa dies first, distressed by the sheer trauma of losing his home through no fault of his own.  He’s buried by the side of the road, with a note of explanation.

(As an aside, today I attended a funeral for an elderly gentleman.  One of his daughters told me that the last straw, in her opinion, was putting the beloved family home up for sale.  The parallels are unmistakable and unsettling, and I cannot help but contemplate that unfettered competition inflicted upon those whose age has made them unable, or even uninterested, in the battle, hardly seems appropriate in a civilization claiming to for for those unable to protect themselves.)

Next pushed down the creek to the ocean of forever is Grandma, the loss of her husband and the road itself proving too much of a challenge for the elderly infirm.  Her last contribution to her beloved family is that her body, her staring eyes, a pitiable epitome of a victim of man’s greed, convinces police at a checkpoint to let the family through, where they might have otherwise been turned away from the land of manna.

And that would be California, where there is fruit to be picked and men to be lost!  Yes, sir, on the way to the fabled land of work and honey, the husband of one of the family daughters, she, naturally, in the family way, skips out, leaving her prostrate with grief.  His talk of pursuing a lucrative trade leaves us to wonder if his dismay at the travails of the family has pushed him away – or if he’ll just trade his wife for a taste of commerce with which to feed himself – and perhaps only himself.

But we’re not done yet disposing of this excess humanity!  A former pastor, Casy, played by the formidable John Carradine, joined the family caravan at the jumping off point.  Questioning his faith, unable to perform those spiritual duties of an informal spiritual leader, not feeling the spirit move him, he can work and fulfill his obligations, but in a world where all he knew and trusted no longer works, he’s at a loss.  But now, in California, as they work for wages that hover on the very edge between subsistence and starvation, Casy has discovered a new faith: labor unions.  In the dark of night, Tom, the former prisoner, seeks him out and finds him hiding from company enforcers.  Eventually, in a creek under a bridge, the enforcers find Casy, Tom, and others, and a single, symbolic clubbing sends Casy off to his maker; in vengeance, Tom becomes a recidivist, and one of the enforcers accompanies Casy on his last journey.

The Joads, carefully shielding Tom from view, move on to another job, and this is like heaven: the workers control the means of production, and how this farm is governed.  For a short while, peace reigns; then the free market, sensing apostasy, cancer, even kaiju (if you’ll forgive the shattering of conceptual walls), attempts, through the deceits of faux riots and corrupt lawmen, to dismember the farm; but the farmhands, sensing the forces of envious greed surrounding them, peacefully (more or less) nip Bud in the bud, and the lawmen, disgruntled, are forced to leave with their clubs unbloodied.

The final blow to the family is Tom, realizing his endangerment of the family, decides to leave them, proclaiming that, as an outlaw, he must now thrive in the land where the unfortunate are found, never to be on the good side of the law again.  His Ma shoulders this final burden, and vows she’ll feel fear no more; sans Tom they lower their heads to take Fortune’s hard shots, forced upon them by Man’s greed.

Is it a great movie?  Yes, marvelous performances, good writing, not really a spec of humor, so it’s a movie that’s also good for you.  If you’re not in the mood for that sort of thing, then perhaps this isn’t for you.

Concerning the effect of CO₂ on plants, a reader notes:

It seems the science on this is in its infancy. Where’s the evidence that plants are currently growth limited by carbon dioxide, for instance? There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that human height is oxygen limited within most normal ranges — or is there? Do people in South Carolina regularly grow taller than people in Colorado and Wyoming, because there’s more oxygen in the air at sea level?

No data found in 5 minutes of searching.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog takes a shot at the right wing ACA critics:

But aside from the garden-variety nonsense, the debate’s audience also heard a more specific claim from Marco Rubio: “[W]e have a crazy health care law that discourages companies from hiring people.” To which the reality-based community responded, “We do?”

The oddity of the criticism is how easy it is to recognize how wrong it is. We know, for example, that in 2014 – the first full year of ACA implementation – the job market in the United States had its best year since the late 1990s. Indeed, hiring in 2014 was so strong, it surpassed literally any single year in either Bush presidency, and even many of the years in the Clinton era.

How do “Obamacare” critics explain this? As best as I can tell, so far, they don’t even try.

While it’s a convenient turn in employment, how do you go about proving the ACA is causative?  A single chart won’t do it, regardless of how you fly in the debate.  If you take a psychological view of the matter, then is it really a valid claim – or is it just that confidence was boosted (despite the efforts of the GOP to denigrate the legislation at every step), which is not a rational attribute – but undeniably exists.

And at the next depression/recession (which this fellow thinks is imminent), do we also blame the ACA for it?  And if we don’t, is it all cherry picking?

For me, one of the primary attractions of the now-dormant The Dish was the nature of the primary blogger, Andrew Sullivan, was that he was a British ex-pat now living – and loving – the United States.  The observations of a place by someone embedded in, but not of, it may yield insights not apparent to those who grew up here – or don’t live here at all.

In that spirit, I offer up this post from Nancy Graham Holm on The Daily Kos.  She is an American ex-pat embedded in the small nation of Denmark, where they speak as if their mouths are filled with ball-bearings (my observation from long ago), and seem to be uncommonly decent folks:

Personally, I like how Danes value work and workers. They seem to understand that nothing is produced or accomplished in society without labor and they honor rank and file workers just as much as managers. In Danish society, human beings are judged by the strength of their character, not by their professional status or size of their pay-check.  Weekend getaway planning conferences often include everybody-at-the-office, not just upper and middle management, but secretaries, cantine workers and custodians.  Everyone is entitled to express opinions and they do. In Denmark, medical doctors do not wear white coats (except in hospitals) and they normally introduce themselves by their first names. Professors and teachers are also called by their first names and everybody else too that you might meet on the job. The majority of work places have a kitchen and eating area so that mid-morning and mid-afternoon coffee breaks are social events with freshly brewed coffee served in cups and saucers and bakery goods – including, on occasion –  wienerbrød  (yes, what Americans call Danish).

A reader comments on Kentucky’s possibly self-inflicted schadenfreude:

The people who most benefited from Kentucky’s improved health case system are also among those who Republicans spend the most effort trying to prevent from voting — and most of them already have enough hurdles in their way. I’m speculating that a lot of the people who would have supported the Democrat opponent also have a hard time getting to the polls, or being informed. Or I’m all wrong and lots of Kentuckians will be reaping what they sowed in a couple of years to their great dismay.

In a press release from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Kentucky sits at nearly the bottom of the heap when it comes to ballot access:

Kentucky ranks 48th in a new report released today by the Center for American Progress Action Fund that gives each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia an overall rank and examines and assigns grades for the categories of accessibility of the ballot, representation in state government, and influence in the political system. The authors’ analysis reveals that these issues must be addressed in sum, not in silos. “The Health of State Democracies” report gives Kentucky an F in accessibility, an F in representation, and a D+ in influence.

Each state, including Kentucky, has areas for significant improvement, with all states specifically needing to address disproportionate representation—no matter where they finish in the rankings. The report also provides recommendations for improvement for Kentucky, including modernizing voter registration, removing structural barriers to full participation, and mitigating the influence of money in the political system.

The report evaluates Kentucky on measures such as voting laws, redistricting outcomes, campaign finance laws, fair courts, and others as vital, interconnected pieces of a state democracy. There are 22 factors in the three categories, which together paint a much clearer picture of the actual environment within Kentucky than when measured alone.

The referenced report, including a chart of results, is here.  I do not know if this group has a good rep or not, but their bias is obvious and probably appropriate.

The Egyptian elections have led to some surprises, assuming the corruption is not overwhelming.  Amongst them is one of the newest political parties coming in second in the first round of parliamentary elections, the Nation’s Future Party, and the failure of a more traditional party.  Mada Masr has a report on the various results:

The For the Love of Egypt electoral list, known to be a major supporter of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, swept the vote in Upper Egypt and the West Delta, while its main competitor, the Salafi Nour Party, experienced a somewhat surprising defeat.

The Nour Party lost in Alexandria, its strongest power base and the birthplace of the affiliated Salafi Dawah movement. The list only won in the Amreya district, losing the other nine districts in the governorate to For the Love of Egypt. …

One of the more surprising outcomes so far has been the rise of the Nation’s Future Party. The party was founded by 24-year-old Mohamed Badran, who was the head of the Egyptian Student Union in 2013.

Badran is known for his close relationship with Sisi, and many observers have predicted a powerful career for the budding politician. The party fielded 88 candidates in the first round of the elections, 48 of whom reached the runoffs. One of only four independent candidates in the country who won a seat outright in the first round of votes comes from Nation’s Future, while five other party members won seats as part of For the Love of Egypt.

Badran was optimistic about the runoffs in an interview with the privately owned Youm7 newspaper.

Older and better-established political parties did not seem to perform as well. The Wafd Party will see 35 of its candidates in the runoffs, while only five Egyptian Social Democratic Party candidates are still in the running.

Egyptian electoral systems are a little different than others, and Mada Masr has a tutorial here.  The short description of an electoral list is that it can be made up of one or more parties and/or individuals, and they can be thought of as a package deal: if you vote for an electoral list, then you’ve voted for everyone/thing on it.

AL Monitor has an interview with Mr. Badran of the Nation’s Future Party:

Al-Monitor:  How did the Nation’s Future Party manage to rank second in the first round of parliamentary elections, only a year since a young man established it?

Badran:  The Nation’s Future Party started as a campaign by a group of young people who dreamed of bringing about real change, eradicating corruption and confronting crises that emerged after the two revolutions of January 25 and June 30. These crises include economic crises as well as domestic and foreign conspiracies. Following the success of the campaign, we decided to turn the revolution’s slogans, Molotov cocktails and demonstrations into action, and this is how the campaign turned into the Nation’s Future Party. Subsequently, we acquired a popular base and established several headquarters. The party’s victory in the first round of parliamentary elections was expected. It did not come as a surprise, as it was the result of a lot of work, and I expect greater success in the second round. …

Al-Monitor:  Being the youngest head of a party in Egypt, what is your take on the low voter turnout, especially among young people?

Badran:  Such low turnout is only natural because the youth have not felt that the two revolutions have brought about any tangible change. Also, the Egyptian people only take action when they feel that the state is seriously threatened. This was exemplified by the very high turnout for the 2012 presidential elections between former President Mohammed Morsi and Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shafiq.

The low turnout suggests either a lack of faith in the candidates, or in the system itself; the success of Mr. Badran’s party might be put down to simple statistical anomalies which can occur during low turnout elections.  Then again, in a few years he may be the prime minister.  AL Monitor provided coverage of this election just prior to the big day:

Hassan Nafehah, a professor of electoral sciences, told Al-Monitor, “The electoral scene may be boisterous, but there is no hope for the political factions that led the January 25 [2011] or June 30 [2013] revolutions to regain their status; the main competing forces now are those that predominantly lean toward Mubarak’s regime. Electoral lists do not reflect the real roles played by Egyptian political parties, which number around 100, as most of those lists have been imposed by security agencies.” Commenting on the state of individual candidates, Nafehah said, “Political money, partisanship, clan affiliation and personal interests prevail.”

Continuing on this thread, some folks have claimed that higher CO₂ means that plants will grow faster, producing more oxygen and, in some cases, food.  NewScientist (24 October 2015, paywall) reports on some knock-on effects:

THE carbon dioxide we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere is fertilising plants, making them grow faster – but now those plants are sucking our streams dry.

Australia is already parched and will only become dryer as the planet warms and rainfall decreases. On top of this, the country has lost about a quarter of its streamflow over the past 30 years, as plants given an extra boost by our carbon emissions are growing faster and slurping more water. …

Since there is a lot more carbon in the air than there used to be, plants can partially close their pores and still get the same amount of CO₂ while retaining more water, says Ukkola. So early models concluded that if plants lose less water, then there should be more of it in the streams, so streamflow should increase.

But later models disagreed, showing that it depends on exactly how the plants’ growth is affected: if they become more leafy, then they will lose more water to the air.

Usable water is already a problem on this overpopulated planet, as noted here, here, here, and here.  But how will losing greater amounts of moisture to the air affect weather patterns?  Will other areas by affected by more precipitation?  And what will the form take?  Gentle rain or horrendous storms?

Tom Summers has passed away.  He was a leading member of the Twin Cities Citadel users group, an informal, yet tightly knit group that included his late brother, Joe, his daughters, and many of the Twin Cities computer geeks of the ’80s and ’90s.  As an older member of the group, we were fortunate to have his example of maturity, quirky humor, and how to conduct a debate, and this benefited the group greatly as many of the members matured from teenagers into adulthood.  His example to all of us was invaluable.

He also provided technical resources at a time when computers and phone lines, the lifeblood of bulletin boards like Citadel, were scarce and expensive.  As an executive at retailer Schaak Electronics, he could and did dedicate a computer and phone line to running a Citadel bulletin board, a decision which led to a very popular system as his light handed guidance let users’ interests and creativity run rampant.  Tralfamador, as he named the system, managed to achieve a unique termination when Schaak Electronics sank into bankruptcy.  Tom left the system running when the doors were locked, and the usership began bidding it a sad farewell … and weeks later it was still operational.  It finally stopped answering the phone when a creditor representative noticed the computer was plugged into a phone line and disconnected it.

As the Internet melted the Citadel group, I lost direct contact with Tom, but retained contact with one of his daughters, and so heard occasional news: a new career at Honeywell, a heart attack, followed by forced retirement, and gradually fading health.  So this chapter comes to an end, although other chapters continue on in those of his friends and family.

I do not know, nor even have faith, in what comes after death.  But I feel compelled to not say goodbye, but rather Bon Voyage, Tom, and enjoy your next adventure.

A trifling little bit of schadenfreude memorabilia from Kylopod @ The Daily Kos:

Oct. 27, 2006: “[Obama] should run in ’08. He will lose in ’08. And the loss will put him irrevocably on a path to the presidency.” For him to win in ’08 would require a “miracle.” — Charles Krauthammer

Dec. 17, 2006: “Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” — William Kristol

Dec. 22, 2006: “Obama’s shot at the top will be short lived…. Hillary Inc. will grind up and spit out any Democratic challenger that gets in its way.” — Joe Scarborough

Mar. 19, 2007: “The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun.” — Mark Penn

&etc.

Of course, these could have been strategic pronouncements designed to influence voters – except the readers of these pundits are hardly a measurable percentage of voters – even likely voters.  And deciphering any devious intent is more than I care to think about; so I will take them at face value and ask how these pundits could be so wrong about a man who won two Presidential elections (particularly in the face of the Bush disaster) and has displayed a competency quite beyond his predecessor, and arguably going quite a ways back – perhaps to Eisenhower.

But that may be truly unfair – like jury trials, voters are unpredictable in their choices – or lack thereof.  Consider the overwhelming victory of Matt Bevin in the Kentucky gubernatorial race last week, as Steve Benen documents on MaddowBlog:

Arguably more than any other state, Kentucky has created an amazing health network. Under Gov. Steve Beshear’s (D) leadership, the state’s success story has served as a national model for overhauling an ineffective system, replacing it with an effective system that costs less and covers more.

And now it’s likely to be torn down on purpose. Gov.-elect Matt Bevin (R) ran on a platform of dismantling Kynect and scrapping Medicaid expansion on the state, despite the fact that it’s been a literal life-saver for many families in his adopted home state. Last week, the Republican won his race easily, offering him the opportunity to do exactly what he promised to do: gutting health security for much of Kentucky.

The obvious question, of course, is why voters who stood to lose so much would vote for a gubernatorial candidate intent on deliberately making their lives harder. Republican officials, however, assumed that many of these Kentuckians wouldn’t bother to show up on Election Day, and those assumptions largely proved true.

Wondering why, you can blame racism, psychology, several other possibilities, or my favorite – disinterest.  That is, many voters have other things to do than ponder the nuances of national politics and how they may impact their lives on a practical level.  Add in a real distaste for the apparent conduct in just about every party, and I suspect that most voters look for something they can hang their hat on – such as Bevin’s claims of being a political outsider – and go with it.

A new species of extinct raptor discovered at the Hell Creek Formation.  Sci-News:

Paleontologists have discovered what they say is a new giant raptor that lived in what is now South Dakota during the Maastrichtian stage of the Upper Cretaceous, approximately 66 million years ago.

At 18 feet (5.5 m) long, the new creature is among the largest of the carnivorous, two-legged dinosaurs called dromaeosaurids, or ‘raptors.’

“This new predatory dinosaur fills the body size gap between smaller theropods and large tyrannosaurs that lived at this time,” said team member Dr David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas and a co-author of a paper in the journal Paleontological Contributions.

Fossilera:

The most startling item revealed from the analysis of the bones were the presence of “Quill Knobs” located on the ulna. The robustness of these attachment points for feathers would have given Dakotaraptor very long wings when outstretched. While Dakotaraptor was far too large of a creature for flight it is suggested that it could have used its large wings to stabilize itself when pinning down prey.

It is likely that Dakotaraptor evolved from a creature that already had the ability to fly and lost it. That a creature of this size would have seemingly kept adaptations for flight raises interesting questions since the “quill knobs” had been thought to be a flight specific adaptation. This discovery will reveal a lot of information about the evolution of flight and feathers.

(h/t Jon Tennant on D-brief blog)