Rick Perry’s favorite Beatles’ song is “Here Comes the Sun,” and this summer he got his wish with record heat, drought and fire in Texas. He pretends to doubt climate science because he has calculated that his short-term interests benefit from that calculation. He brags about being dumb because he recognizes that there is a big demand for that. I don’t know how you can both brag about being dumb AND expect people to think you understand climate science, but this isn’t a troubling paradox at all, if you don’t bother to think about what a troubling paradox might be.
The rich in this country are in a bit of pickle, although when you’re rich, pickles are just one of life’s many garnishes. They have all the money, but they don’t have many votes among themselves. They have engineered a Supreme Court that has redefined “money” as “speech,” but until they go all the way and declare money to be “votes,” they will have to work through middlemen. (One of their current schemes is to have their store-bought officials enact every manner of state law to decrease the number of voters they don’t like, as votes they don’t like have been redefined as “fraud.”) All is going well, but their pickle is that Rick Perry may be too much too soon and might turn off “sensible voters in the middle.”
Personally I don’t see what they have to worry about. I don’t see much sensible anywhere anymore. The bad economy is poised to bring down Obama, just as it raised him up. His enemies will not rest until he and all his acts are “repealed on my first day in office” by whomever and whenever. His friends flee as even the Democrats in Congress won’t get behind his jobs plan. The “sensible center” says in polls that it supports Obama’s positions and blames the GOP for gridlock, but then turns around and votes for more Republicans in special elections. If we are just too tired to think anymore, and falling SAT scores suggest we are, here is the simple answer: Dismantle the government, and hope the markets don’t crush so many people that we get social instability of a very different sort. Smart? We’ll find out!
Then today, Texas Gov. Rick Perry went to Liberty University. It was, at least in part, a celebration of ignorance. The Post’s reporter at the scene Phil Rucker tweeted some of the remarks. Jon Ward at Huffington Post likewise recorded some comments. Things started off on a poor note with Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. praising Perry’s seccessionist remarks as “gutsy.” Are we to believe now that Perry was serious about secession? Then Perry, apparently deciding to make ads for the Obama campaign, came out with a series of “See how dumb I am?” one-liners. He observed that he needed to pull out a dictionary to see what “convocation” meant. The next knee-slapper: He didn’t have the grades to be a vet, so he became a pilot. And then the real howler: He was in the top 10 in a high school class of 13.
Yes, he was trying to be self-deprecating, but it’s disturbing to see that he thinks being a rotten student and a know-nothing gives one street cred in the GOP. Is it so important to defy the MSM by flaunting affection for anti-intellectualism?
Despite a widespread belief that contracting out services to the private sector saves the federal government money, a new study suggests just the opposite — that the government actually pays more when it farms out work.
The study found that in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers. ...
For example, the study found that, on average, the federal government paid contractors $268,653 per year for computer engineering services, while government workers in the same occupation made $136,456.
For human resources management, the federal government paid contractors an annual rate of $228,488, more than twice the $111,711 to have the same services done in-house.
The Office of Personnel Management, which administers the federal work force, did not respond to questions about the study, but in the past it has criticized reports that say federal workers are overpaid.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Rick Perry's HPV Vaccine Mandate | ||||
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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In the urban jungle of Juazeiro in Brazil, an army is being unleashed. It is an army like no other: the soldiers' mission is to copulate rather than fight. But they are harbingers of death, not love. Their children appear healthy at first but die just before they reach adulthood, struck down by the killer genes their fathers passed on to them.
These soldiers are the first of a new kind of creature - "autocidal" maniacs genetically modified to wipe out their own kind without harming other creatures. The first animals being targeted with these "living pesticides" are disease-carrying mosquitoes and crop-munching caterpillars, but the approach should work with just about any animal - from invasive fish and frogs to rats and rabbits. If it is successful, it could transform the way we think about genetically engineered animals. ...
In theory, unlike zapping animals with radiation or chemosterilisation, the genetic approach should work well with just about any species. Besides the pink bollworm, Oxitec is targeting the mosquito Aedes aegypti, the single most important carrier of dengue, a viral disease that affects 50 to 100 million people in tropical regions every year,...
[Luke] Alphey and his colleagues have created a strain of A. aegypti with two copies of a gene that disrupts the development of offspring. The gene is switched off in the presence of the antibiotic tetracycline, allowing large numbers of perfectly fit mosquitoes to be bred for release. "With our system, the mosquitoes are fundamentally sterile and we're keeping them alive by giving them an artificial antidote," says Alphey. The insects also have the DsRed marker gene, to enable them to be easily monitored.
When these mosquitoes mate with wild females, the eggs hatch and the larvae develop normally until they reach the pupae stage, when the killer genes kick in. Delaying death like this is actually a cunning trick: the doomed larvae compete with wild larvae for resources, further reducing their numbers. ...
Transporting adults is not feasible. "Adult mosquitoes are all spindly and if you pack them into any kind of space, you end up with legs tangled up with wings and a lot of physical damage," says Alphey.
Instead, his team has created a strain in which the females cannot fly. The work was based on the discovery that female mosquitoes have a unique flight muscle protein that males lack, perhaps because females have to fly after a blood meal and so must fly with a much heavier load. Flightless females cannot find people to feed on and cannot mate either, so there is no need to separate the sexes. Envelopes containing millions of eggs could simply be mailed to wherever they are needed. "Just add water and you get instant mosquitoes," says Alphey.
The males that hatch from the eggs will appear normal and can pass the flightless gene to their daughters. Their sons will also inherit a single copy, so they too will produce some flightless daughters. "The construct will persist in the population for several generations but not for long due to its high fitness cost," says Alphey.
[I]f autocidal technology lives up to its promise, it could be about as environmentally friendly as pest control can get. It could largely or entirely replace pesticides, and it affects only the target species. Last but not least, it is hard to see what could go wrong.
Many engineered plants, for instance, are being given advantageous traits such as disease resistance, so these genes could well spread among wild relatives. Autocidal traits, by contrast, are a great disadvantage and should disappear from the wild within a few generations after releases stop. "We are putting genes with huge, huge fitness penalties like death into something that's undesirable in the first place," says Alphey.
In theory, wild insects might be able to evolve resistance, for instance, by somehow learning to recognise and avoid insects with lethal genes. But this is much less likely to develop than pesticide resistance, and could be overcome by altering the release strain.
Needless to say, those opposed to genetic engineering are not convinced. "Genetic modification leads to both intended and unintended effects," says Ricarda Steinbrecher of EcoNexus, which describes itself as "a not-for-profit, public interest research organization". "There are potential knock-on effects on many other organisms," she claims.
Most biologists, though, agree the risks are minimal. "It is true that some of the regulations are being put together as the programmes are moving along, but the risks are really very, very small," says Mark Benedict, an entomologist at the University of Perugia in Italy.
To fight the cancer stalking their village, some late-stage patients in Xinglong, southwest China, eat bugs every day, in hope of a folk cure. Farmer Cui Xiaoliang hopes for another, more substantial remedy.
"I wish all the polluting factories would move away, but I worry, even if they move, it will be impossible to clean up all their waste in a short time," says Cui, 40, who blames nearby chemical firms for the deaths by cancer of his father and an aunt. ...
Some estimates suggest China has more than 400 "cancer villages," rural clusters of the disease close to polluting factories. Locals in one village in Tongzhou, the easternmost district of China's capital, grimly call their main street "Cancer Road."
Fear of reprisals from authorities, who are re-modeling Tongzhou into "the Manhattan of Beijing," stops villagers from going on the record. Police forced a USA TODAY reporter to leave the village. ...
More than half of China's cities are affected by acid rain, and one-sixth of its river water is too polluted even for irrigation, said the ministry's annual state of the environment report published in June.
Last week the ministry pledged to crack down on hazardous waste. But environmental activists caution that Beijing has failed to keep earlier promises, including a 2010 deadline, now extended to the end of 2012, for clearing all chromium waste, a major heavy metal pollutant.
China still has more than 1 million tons of untreated chromium residues, environmental group Greenpeace says. The illegal dumping of 5,000 tons of this highly toxic waste outside Qujing city, Yunnan, revealed last month, "is just the tip of the iceberg," Ma [Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based non-profit] says.
"Through this massive industrialization we have discharged so many heavy metals that will affect this generation and generations to come," he says.
For both Chinese and foreign firms, "the cost of violation is lower than the cost of compliance, so many companies choose to pay fines year after year," rather than clean up their operations, he says.
Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar.
Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded that it was certain to be crystalline. In other words, we had discovered a planet made of diamond. ...
Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been.
How so? Well, we could have been climate scientists. ...
It may come as a big surprise to many, but there is actually no difference between how science works in astronomy and climate change – or any other scientific discipline for that matter.
We make observations, run simulations, test and propose hypotheses, and undergo peer review of our findings.
We get together (usually in nice locations around the world) and discuss and debate our own pet theories, become friends and form a worldwide community.
If you are a solid state physicist, an astronomer, or doing laser optics, the world is happy to celebrate your discoveries, use them in new products such as WiFi, and wonder about the growth in knowledge and technology. ...
But on occasion those from the fringe of the scientific community will push a position that is simply not credible against the weight of evidence.
This occurs within any discipline. But it seems it’s only in the field of climate science that such people are given airtime and column inches to espouse their views.
Those who want to ignore what’s happening to Earth feel they need to be able to quote “alternative studies”, regardless of the scientific merit of those studies.
In all fields of science, papers are challenged and statistics are debated. If there is any basis to these challenges they stand, but if not they fall by the wayside and the field continues to advance.
When big theories fall, it isn’t because of business or political pressures – it’s because of the scientific process.
Sadly, the same media commentators who celebrate diamond planets without question are all too quick to dismiss the latest peer-reviewed evidence that suggests man-made activities are responsible for changes in concentrations of CO2 in our atmosphere.
The scientific method is universal. If we selectively ignore it in certain disciplines, we do so at our peril.
[O]ur research indicates that al Qaeda and those motivated by its ideology are not the only sources of terrorism that the country faces and that terrorists across the ideological spectrum from those motivated by Osama bin Laden's ideology to neo-Nazis have managed to kill only 30 people in the United States since the attacks on Washington and New York a decade ago.
While each of those deaths is, or course, a tragedy, it is orders of magnitude smaller than the 15,000 Americans who are murdered every year.
Our study also found that Islamist terrorism has been no more deadly in the United States than other forms of domestic terrorism since September 11.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, one of the fears of ordinary citizens and terrorism experts alike was that a new wave of terrorists would strike, some of them armed with chemical, biological, radiological or even nuclear materials.
Ten years later, we have yet to see an Islamist terrorist incident involving such weapons in the United States, and no Islamist militant in this country has made a documented attempt to even acquire such devices.
Yet this is not the case for other terrorists. Indeed, the record of the past decade suggests that if a chemical, biological or radiological attack were to take place in the United States, it is more likely that it would come not from a Islamist terrorist but from a right-wing extremist or anarchist.
The data indicate that federal and local authorities are just as aggressive in their use of informants and undercover agents with right- and left-wing terrorists as they are with Muslims extremists. And Muslims and non-Muslims alike are just as likely to cooperate with authorities when they see extremist acts going on, contrary to well-publicized claims from the head of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King, that Muslim community involvement in disrupting terrorism plots is uncommonly low.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Coming Soon - The Daily Show Remembers 9/13/2001 | ||||
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After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind. As a nation we have looked back for too long. We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong. The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided and less certain of itself. ...
[I]f we continue to place 9/11 at the center of our national consciousness, we will keep making the same mistakes. Our nation’s future depended on far more than the outcome of a vaguely defined “war on terrorism,” and it still does. Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies. ...
It was often said that terrorism could not be dealt with through “police work,” as if the difficult and unheralded labor involved was not grand or bold enough to satisfy our longing for clarity in what was largely a struggle in the shadows.
Forgive me, but I find it hard to forget former president George W. Bush’s 2004 response to Sen. John Kerry’s comment that “the war on terror is less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement operation.”
Bush retorted: “I disagree — strongly disagree. . . . After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got.” What The Washington Post called “an era of endless war” is what we got, too.
Bush, of course, understood the importance of “intelligence gathering” and “law enforcement.” His administration presided over a great deal of both, and his supporters spoke, with justice, of his success in staving off further acts of terror. Yet he could not resist the temptation to turn on Kerry’s statement of the obvious. Thus was an event that initially united the nation used, over and over, to aggravate our political disharmony. This is also why we must put it behind us.
In the flood of anniversary commentary, notice how often the term “the lost decade” has been invoked. We know now, as we should have known all along, that American strength always depends first on our strength at home — on a vibrant, innovative and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements.
This is not “isolationism.” It is a common sense that was pushed aside by the talk of “glory” and “honor,” by utopian schemes to transform the world by abruptly reordering the Middle East — and by our fears. While we worried that we would be destroyed by terrorists, we ignored the larger danger of weakening ourselves by forgetting what made us great.
As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.
Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.
In Texas, under "emergency" legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date – requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year. ...
The barriers erected in Texas and Wisconsin go beyond what the Supreme Court upheld in Indiana, where 99 percent of state voters possess the requisite IDs and can turn to full-time DMVs in every county to obtain the proper documentation. By contrast, roughly half of all black and Hispanic residents in Wisconsin do not have a driver's license, and the state staffs barely half as many DMVs as Indiana – a quarter of which are open less than one day a month. To make matters worse, Gov. Scott Walker tried to shut down 16 more DMVs – many of them located in Democratic-leaning areas. In one case, Walker planned to close a DMV in Fort Atkinson, a liberal stronghold, while opening a new office 30 minutes away in the conservative district of Watertown. ...
One of the most restrictive laws requiring voter IDs was passed in South Carolina. To obtain the free state ID now required to vote, the 178,000 South Carolinians who currently lack one must pay for a passport or a birth certificate. "It's the stepsister of the poll tax," says Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project. Under the new law, many elderly black residents – who were born at home in the segregated South and never had a birth certificate – must now go to family court to prove their identity. Given that obtaining fake birth certificates is one of the country's biggest sources of fraud, the new law may actually prompt some voters to illegally procure a birth certificate in order to legally vote – all in the name of combating voter fraud.
For those voters who manage to get a legitimate birth certificate, obtaining a voter ID from the DMV is likely to be hellishly time-consuming. A reporter for the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee – another state now mandating voter IDs – recently waited for four hours on a sweltering July day just to see a DMV clerk. The paper found that the longest lines occur in urban precincts, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from erecting hurdles to voting in minority jurisdictions.
To hear Republicans tell it, they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud – a curious position for a party that managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a "top priority" for federal prosecutors. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue trumped-up cases of voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington, and Karl Rove called illegal voting "an enormous and growing problem." In parts of America, he told the Republican National Lawyers Association, "we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses." According to the GOP, community organizers like ACORN were actively recruiting armies of fake voters to misrepresent themselves at the polls and cast illegal ballots for the Democrats.
Even at the time, there was no evidence to back up such outlandish claims. A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. "Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. "It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning," the report calculated, "than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls." ...
This year, [Kansas Secretary of State Kris] Kobach successfully fought for a law requiring every Kansan to show proof of citizenship in order to vote – even though the state prosecuted only one case of voter fraud in the past five years. The new restriction fused anti-immigrant hysteria with voter-fraud paranoia. "In Kansas, the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive," Kobach claimed, offering no substantiating evidence.
Kobach also asserted that dead people were casting ballots, singling out a deceased Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as one such zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was still very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard. "I don't think this is heaven," Brewer told the paper. "Not when I'm raking leaves."
Kobach might be the gop's most outspoken crusader working to prevent citizens from voting, but he's far from the only one. "Voting rights are under attack in America," Rep. John Lewis, who was brutally beaten in Alabama while marching during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, observed during an impassioned speech on the House floor in July. "There's a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process."
Since January, six states have introduced legislation to impose new restrictions on voter registration drives run by groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters. In May, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution.
As a result, the law threatens to turn civic-minded volunteers into inadvertent criminals. Denouncing the legislation as "good old-fashioned voter suppression," the League of Women Voters announced that it was ending its registration efforts in Florida, where it has been signing up new voters for the past 70 years.
Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.
The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.
Except her own plane. So that was the plan.
Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.
Penney worried about missing the target if she tried to bail out.
“If you eject and your jet soars through without impact . . .” she trails off, the thought of failing more dreadful than the thought of dying.
But she didn’t have to die. She didn’t have to knock down an airliner full of kids and salesmen and girlfriends. They did that themselves.
It would be hours before Penney and Sasseville learned that United 93 had already gone down in Pennsylvania, an insurrection by hostages willing to do just what the two Guard pilots had been willing to do: Anything. And everything.
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