anti-wolf, anti-science

Fear of wolves is one of those irrational, deep-seated human traits. As Farley Mowat and others have pointed out, wolves pose virtually danger to humans, and little danger to livestock. Yet in the West wars over the classification of wolves take on an unusual prominence.

As part of the unfortunate budget deal Obama agreed to last Friday, a hostage negotiation with the operation of the federal government on the line, Obama agreed to a small, little-noticed rider that allowed Congress to change the endangered status of wolves in Montana and Idaho.

Now there is nothing wrong, per se, with a species being taken off the Endangered Species list, if the evidence warrants such an action. But the process established by Congress does not--until this week--allow for political machinations to override scientific consensus. Now the status of every animal on the list is on the table, with congress members vying with each other for which animal--stubbornly confounding some development project with its insistence on living--is to be taken off next.

The issue is science denial. Do we have a system where scientists come to a conclusion based on evidence, and then take action on a species' status, or do we have a system where politicians make these decisions, based on their own economic interests?

In the reality based community, scientific facts have meaning and relevance. In the world of science denial, facts are as fungible as opinions, because at their core denialists do not accept the idea of an objective, rational world outside their own subjective experience. They engage in magical thinking at its worst.

Dam Failures

One of the worst ways to deny science is to ignore hazards to health, hazards which are well-understood by science. One of the least known dangers we face is from dam collapse.

During the early part of the 20th century, America's rivers became dammed at a prodigious rate. Virtually every major American river is dammed at multiple points. Virtually every dam is silting rapidly behind the dam, as the normal sediment flow is interrupted.

All dams are temporary, geologically-speaking. And our nation's dams, like so much of our infrastructure, are not holding up well.

As this recent report in the New York Times details, if you have water flowing out of your tap, you live downstream from a dam. You might not be directly in the flow expected from a dam failure, but many of your neighbors are.

Britain, the peninsula

When sea level started rising from its low point 17,000 years ago, the coastline of the world were dramatically changed. According to this recent BBC report,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12244964

Britain remained a peninsula, connected to Normandy, until 6,100 years ago, when a titanic tsunami inundated what would become the English Channel. So much for those wankers who say Britain shouldn't be in the EU.

Cops, or Libraries?

In reality this is not an either/or choice, but the police union in Los Angeles has just officially come out against libraries.

The union that represents LAPD officers came out strongly today against Measure L, an item on the March 8 ballot that would set aside funding for the Los Angeles Public Library system.

In a statement, Los Angeles Police Protective League President Paul Weber said the measure "will create more problems than it solves"

Although this seems typical for a state that spends more on its prison system and its university system, yet it is remarkable to see such posturing to plainly.

One way to guarantee disorder and strife is to create artificial scarcity. Scarcity pits cops against libraries, university students against administrators, families against banks. Only by reforming the financing of such institutions as libraries, universities, and the police force can we hope to end such useless, futile conflicts. It is the current chaotic financing system for public institutions that should be shut down, not libraries.

Academically Adrift

A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, offers refreshing insights into the problems plaguing higher education. Based on information from over 2,000 students on 24 United States campuses, Academically Adrift paints a disturbing picture of the failures of modern education.

In short, students are not working hard enough:

1. Students are not spending enough hours studying : only 12-14 per week. Most of that time is spent in “group” study sessions that are little more peer socializing with a veneer of self-deceptive justification that studying might be occurring. The study also found that solo studiers fared better.
2. Students are not learning enough in some majors. Business majors, for example, showed far fewer educational gains than those in liberal arts. This reflects the non-academic, vocational emphasis of business courses compared to the intellectual challenges offered by courses in literature, rhetoric, and philosophy.
3. Students are not being required to read or write enough. This is hardly a surprise, considering that so many college students are unable to form even basic ideas into coherent sentences.
4. Students involved in fraternities and sororities learned less. This is, again, no surprise, as such socialization can only detract from time available for studying.
5. Arum & Roska’s work concludes with the damning statistic that 45% of students see no improvement in their first two years of college work, and 36% fail to have improvement over all four years of college.

UC Corruption

The highest-paid officials of the University of California have decided that they're not being paid enough.

Specifically, 36 of the top 200 earners in the UC administration have recently threatened to file suit if their retirement packages are not recalculated to avoid a $245,000 federal limit. Because these workers earn more than that, they feel they should be entitled to have their retirements recalculated based on their current incomes rather than this federal cap. They are demanding this despite the financial chaos of the last few years, which have seen a 32% increase in UC feeds in 2009, and an 8% increase in 2010. And they want the money retroactive to 2007.

The average wage in 2009 was $49,777; a retirement benefit above $245,00 would be, therefore, almost five times what the average worker makes.

Such superstar compensation might make sense if these leading UC administrators were actually doing a good job. If they had, for example, used their political contacts and influence to prevent the state of California from cutting its education budget, then they would have earned their salaries. Police union representatives certainly earned their salaries, as they were so successful in preventing cuts to bloated law enforcement budgets. But it seems no one is there to help defend education. Not only did these administrators fail to force Sacramento from making its draconian cuts, it seems as if they hardly even tried.

A more just and equitable system would be this: Let the salaries and retirements of the top 200 UC administrators from this point forward come entirely as bonuses paid from the funds they prevent from being cut. If Sacramento cuts the UC budget, they receive nothing. Perhaps this would motivate them to take the battle to Sacramento with the same enthusiasm Sacramento has displayed for destroying public education in California.

Those executives would argue that such a salary structure change would, as they put it in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, "jeopardize the system's ability to recruit top employees." The unasked question is--are these really the "top" employees, when they so miserably fail to protect their system? And what is it they do, anyway, that justify such salaries?

Let Obama Be Obama

In the West Wing episode (Season 1, episode 19) 'Let Barlet Be Barlet,' the fictional president Jed Barlet is failing.

On every front, when facing challenges from opposing Republicans and the military brass, Barlet choses to make meaningless gestures, "dipping his toes in" rather than fighting for his values. He lets one of his aides have a meeting with military officials about gay members of the military, but makes clear that this will not lead to repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Barlet half-heartedly considers appointing reformers to the Federal Election Commission, but realizes that Congress has already staked claim to the openings.

After a confrontation with his devoted chief of staff, President Barlet realizes that he needs to start fighting now if he ever hopes to achieve his agenda. The episode concludes with all staff members pledging to follow their president's wishes.

President Obama should Netflix this episode and watch it twice.

The tragedy of the first two years of the Obama administration is not that this highly-talented, fiercely-smart president was unable to achieve his legislative agenda; the tragedy is that he did achieve it, and that the bar he set himself was so low.

A half-hearted health care reform was passed, but without the critical components that would have made it a truly monumental reform. Don't get me wrong--it's great that more kids will be eligible to be insured, but the individual mandate means that by law their parents now must buy unaffordable insurance. Obama took the bold--and obvious--solution of expanding Medicare to everyone off the table very early, before it was ever seriously considered.

Obama also acted prudently to keep the US economy from plunging further into financial chaos. But while the "stimulus bill" helped banks, it did nothing to create jobs. We now creating a small fraction of the jobs we need each month just to keep pace with population growth; projections are that twelve million jobs would need to be created just to reach the point we were last at when the economy collapsed in October 2008. Instead of taking the bold--and obvious--step of revamping the Works Progress Administration and directly hiring unemployed people, Obama's talk of tax credits for businesses sounds limp.

Obama could have done much more. And now, with his enemies poised to usurp the House, he will have the chance to do far less.

In many ways, Obama is Barlet brought to life. Both are Nobel laureates. Both brim with intelligent and verbal clarity. Both are fundamentally good people. Here is what Obama wrote in his book Dreams of My Father:

"I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children in Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder--alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware--is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism, dooms us all."

Obama is of the mettle of Lincoln, for no other modern president has been so eloquent and empathetic, and of all qualities in a person, empathy is the most important, while eloquence shows the quality of thought. After the nightmare years of the inchoate Bush reign, Obama's mind is a like waking up and taking a breath.

Let us hope that, like Lincoln, his victories will be more plainly seen in retrospect. During Lincoln's terms, one could have mistaken his tactics for chaos--an unruly cabinet, disobedient generals, a war stalled in its early years. The martyred, brilliant Lincoln is hardly the pre-Appomattox Lincoln, who was widely mocked and criticized almost until the moment when he achieved total victory.

But if Obama is not to enjoy Lincoln's post-assassination apotheosis, then he needs to start fighting for his values now. It is great to win a game, and unfortunate to lose, but it seems as if Obama has not even suited up. He has punted the ball on third down. It's time to get in the game.