Thursday, February 24, 2011

empathy comes naturally to both humans and animals

http://www.wonderlance.com/february2011_scientech_fransdewaal.html

----- (skipping)

MDM: The results of your outstanding work have indeed leaked into the human realm, for it covers what are the origins of morality. ‘The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society’, published in 2009, is a thought-provoking account of how empathy comes naturally to both humans and animals. Are we witnessing the end of an erroneous stream of thinking in which selfishness and self-preservation were seen as the only basic ‘natural instincts’ of all animal species?
PROF. FRANS DE WAAL: For the past three decades, scientists and popularizers have tried to tell us that we and all other animals are inherently selfish, and that the evolution of morality is an almost impossible affair, since nature cannot provide the caring for others needed for morality. I call this "Veneer Theory," since it assumes that human morality and kindness is just a thin veneer over an

otherwise nasty human nature. This is a position that goes back to Thomas Henry Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin, and has been repeated over and over even though Darwin himself disagreed. Darwin saw human morality as continuous with animal social instincts, and my own work is a return to Darwinian thinking. I am supported in this now by many recent studies that indicate that humans (and other animals) are far more altruistic and cooperative than was assumed. The field has radically changed in recent years. Psychologists stress the intuitive way we arrive at moral judgments while activating emotional brain areas, and economists and anthropologists have shown humanity to be far more cooperative, altruistic, and fair than predicted by self-interest models. Similarly, the latest experiments in primatology reveal that our close relatives will do each other favors even if there's nothing in it for themselves.

Chimpanzees and bonobos will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part of it in the process. And capuchin monkeys are prepared to seek rewards for others, such as when we place two of them side by side, while one of them barters with us with differently colored tokens. One token is ‘selfish,’ and the other ‘prosocial.’ If the bartering monkey selects the selfish token, it receives a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner gets nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewards both monkeys. Most monkeys develop an overwhelming preference for the prosocial token, which preference is not due to fear of repercussions, because dominant monkeys (who have least to fear) are the most generous.

MDM: In your opinion, what would be the single most important lesson that we, as human beings, could learn from the animal world?

PROF. FRANS DE WAAL: We can learn about the origins of our sociality, both in terms of hierarchies, competition and power games and in terms of empathy and morality. We share both with our animal relatives, both the good and the bad, and should stop blaming everything we don't like about ourselves on our biology ("we're acting like animals!") while claiming all good we do for our noble human nature. All of our tendencies evolved for a reason among the social primates, and once we understand this, we will better understand the dynamics of our own societies.

MDM: What are your views on eating animal meat? Is that natural in us and thus necessary and unavoidable, like in many other carnivorous species? How do we reconcile our carnivorous ways with the notion of animal conscience and emotion?

PROF. FRANS DE WAAL: Eating meat is as natural for our close relatives, the chimpanzees, as it is for us. In fact, hunting large game and sharing the pay-offs has probably played a major role in human evolution, resulting in reciprocity and cooperation at a level few other animals achieve. The mammals that do achieve high levels of cooperation are mostly carnivores, such as killer whales and wolves, and also chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys cooperate during hunts. So, meat has been very important to our lineage. Whether we need to eat meat is a separate question for me, since I think we are smart enough to find ways of obtaining the nutrients we need without meat. It doesn't seem a strict necessaity. I myself do like and eat meat, but the practices of the agricultural meat industry bother me for ethical reasons, and I would be very happy if we either could change those practices or raise meat in the absence of a central nervous system. What I mean is meat-growing plants where muscles are grown without growing the entire animal, so that suffering can be excluded. This possibility seems to be getting closer, and would remove the ethical dilemma for me.

..

People With Low Self-Esteem Show More Signs of Prejudice

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110223151945.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — When people are feeling badly about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how that works.

"This is one of the oldest accounts of why people stereotype and have prejudice: It makes us feel better about ourselves," says Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen. "When we feel bad about ourselves, we can denigrate other people, and that makes us feel better about ourselves."

----- (skipping)

..

Wisconsin Power Play

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 20, 2011

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.


----- (skipping)

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

----- (skipping)

..

Tansy May Be a Treatment for Herpes

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110222083201.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — For centuries, tansy has been used as a folk remedy, but now scientists from Britain and Spain believe the plant may have medical benefits after all, as a treatment for herpes. The team's findings, published in Phytotherapy Research, are the result of joint work between two teams to established scientific evidence for traditional medicines.

----- (skipping)

..

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Tea Party Leader Plans to Plant Union "Goons"

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/tea-party-leader-plan-infiltrate-wisconsin-seiu-wiunion

By Adam Weinstein
| Sun Feb. 20, 2011 5:23 PM PST

Last year, Mark Williams was tossed out of the Tea Party Express for his racially insensitive NAACP parody. (Three weeks later, he took the helm of an upstart tea party group.) Now, he wants to sow mayhem among "the union goons in Wisconsin" and elsewhere. According to a post on his blog today, Williams is seeking volunteers to pose with him as members of the Service Employees International Union at a Sacramento, California, rally, to act like angry fools and get the union workers bad publicity from "lazy reporters":

we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like “screw the taxpayer!” and “you OWE me!” to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us) (6) we will echo those slogans in angry sounding tones to the cameras and the reporters.

Williams later updated the post to report that tea partiers in multiple states, including Iowa, Colorado, and Massachusetts, were calling in to plan "their own creative ruses" for embarrasing the union demonstrators. "Several have also reminded me that we have a distinct advantage in that the SEIU primarily represents non-English speaking illegal aliens so we will be the ones whose comments will make air!!!!" he wrote:

Our goal is to make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is, ding their credibility with the media and exploit the lazy reporters who just want dramatic shots and outrageous quotes for headlines. Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.


----- (skipping)

..

Cell Phone Use May Have Effect on Brain Activity, but Health Consequences Unknown

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110222162308.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2011) — In a preliminary study, researchers found that 50-minute cell phone use was associated with increased brain glucose metabolism (a marker of brain activity) in the region closest to the phone antenna, but the finding is of unknown clinical significance, according to a study in the February 23 issue of JAMA.

"The dramatic worldwide increase in use of cellular telephones has prompted concerns regarding potential harmful effects of exposure to radiofrequency-modulated electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs). Of particular concern has been the potential carcinogenic effects from the RF-EMF emissions of cell phones. However, epidemiologic studies of the association between cell phone use and prevalence of brain tumors have been inconsistent (some, but not all, studies showed increased risk), and the issue remains unresolved," according to background information in the article. The authors add that studies performed in humans to investigate the effects of RF-EMF exposures from cell phones have yielded variable results, highlighting the need for studies to document whether RF-EMFs from cell phone use affects brain function in humans.

----- (skipping)

..

Babies and Toddlers Can Suffer Mental Illness, Seldom Get Treatment

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110222162320.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2011) — Infants and toddlers can suffer serious mental health disorders, yet they are unlikely to receive treatment that could prevent lasting developmental problems, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.


One barrier to mental health care for young children is "the pervasive, but mistaken, impression that young children do not develop mental health problems and are immune to the effects of early adversity and trauma because they are inherently resilient and 'grow out of' behavioral problems and emotional difficulties," according to researchers Joy D. Osofsky, PhD, of Louisiana State University, and Alicia F. Lieberman, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco.

----- (skipping)

Contrary to traditional beliefs that infants cannot have mental health problems "because they lack mental life," even young infants can react to the meaning of others' intentions and emotions because they have their own rudimentary intentions and motivating emotions, according to an article by Tronick and Marjorie Beeghly, PhD, of Wayne State University. While trauma can be a significant factor in developing mental health issues, the authors encourage more study of the impact of everyday life and continual interactions between infants and parents or other caregivers.

"Infants make meaning about themselves and their relation to the world of people and things," Tronick and Beeghly stated, and when that "meaning-making" goes wrong, it can lead to development of mental health problems. "Some infants may come to make meaning of themselves as helpless and hopeless, and they may become apathetic, depressed and withdrawn. Others seem to feel threatened by the world and may become hyper-vigilant and anxious." Apparent sadness, anger, withdrawal and disengagement can occur "when infants have difficulty gaining meaning in the context of relationships," they write.

----- (skipping)

..

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216?page=1

By Matt Taibbi
February 16, 2011 9:00 AM ET

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

----- (skipping)

..

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

How Rich Are the Super-rich?

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

March/April 2011 Issue

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

The richest 10% controls 2/3 of Americans' net worth.

----- (skipping)

..

Good luck, Libya

It is distressing to hear of Libya's dictator having the army bomb their own people. It sounds hopeful that they will finally be able to get rid of him.

----- (skipping)

..

How Couples Recover After an Argument Stems from Their Infant Relationships

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218142453.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2011) — When studying relationships, psychological scientists have often focused on how couples fight. But how they recover from a fight is important, too. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, couples' abilities to bounce back from conflict may depend on what both partners were like as infants.

----- (skipping)

With Sally I-Chun Kuo, Ryan D. Steele, Jeffry A. Simpson, and W. Andrew Collins, all from the University of Minnesota, Salvatore embarked on a closer look at what happens after a conflict supposedly ends. By looking back at observations of the participants and their caregivers from the 1970s, when they were between 12 and 18 months old, the researchers discovered a link between the couples' conflict recovery behaviors and the quality of their attachment relationship with their caregivers. People who were more securely attached to their caregivers as infants were better at recovering from conflict 20 years later. This means that if your caregiver is better at regulating your negative emotions as an infant, you tend to do a better job of regulating your own negative emotions in the moments following a conflict as an adult.

The researchers also found that there is hope for people who were insecurely attached as infants. "We found that people who were insecurely attached as infants but whose adult romantic partners recover well from conflict are likely to stay together," remarked Salvatore. "If one person can lead this process of recovering from conflict, it may buffer the other person and the relationship." The health of a relationship can be salvaged if one person can quickly disengage from conflict and avoid dwelling on negative thoughts and emotions.

This is some of the first evidence that romantic partners play an important role in buffering the potential harmful effects from poor experiences earlier in life. "That, to us, was the most exciting finding," Salvatore says. "There's something about the important people later in our lives that changes the consequences of what happened earlier."

..

Monday, February 21, 2011

Portable Pedal Machines May Help Counter Harmful Effects of Sedentary Jobs

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110214201846.htm

cienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2011) — Portable pedal machines could help counter the harmful effects of prolonged periods spent at a desk or workstation among an increasingly sedentary workforce, suggests a small study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

----- (skipping)

..

Stretching Before a Run Does Not Prevent Injury

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218083422.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2011) — Stretching before a run neither prevents nor causes injury, according to a study presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).

----- (skipping)

..

Sunday, February 20, 2011

US Public's Knowledge of Science: Getting Better but a Long Way to Go,

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110216110857.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2011) — Amid concerns about the lagging math and science performance of American children, American adults are actually scoring higher than they did 20 years ago on a widely used index of civic scientific literacy, according to a University of Michigan researcher.

In 1988, just 10 percent of U.S. adults had sufficient understanding of basic scientific ideas to be able to read the Tuesday Science section of The New York Times, according to Jon Miller, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). By 2008, 28 percent of adults scored high enough to understand scientific ideas at that level.

Despite the improvement, the American public has a long way to go, says Miller, who contributed to the latest publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Science and the Educated American.

"America's democracy depends on having a larger number of scientifically literate citizens," said Miller, who directs the ISR International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy and has pioneered methods of assessing comparative levels of scientific understanding over time. "Today's political agenda includes debates over global climate change, embryonic stem cells, future energy sources, and the possibility of a viral pandemic. And as the twenty-first century progresses, scientific issues are only likely to become more prominent features of the political landscape."

In fact, America is the only major country that requires almost all its college and university students to complete a full year of science, Miller points out. So the scientific literacy of U.S. adults is relatively high compared to the general adult populations of other developed nations. But given the on-going changes in many fields of science, most adults will learn most of their information about science after they leave formal schooling.
----- (skipping)

..

Why Innocent Suspects May Confess to a Crime

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218111825.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2011) — Why would anyone falsely confess to a crime they didn't commit? It seems illogical, but according to The Innocence Project, there have been 266 post-conviction DNA exonerations since 1989 -- 25 percent of which involved a false confession.

A new Iowa State University study may shed light on one reason for those false confessions. In two experiments simulating choices suspects face in police interrogations, undergraduate subjects altered their behavior to confess to illegal activities in order to relieve short-term distress (the proximal consequence) while discounting potential long-term (distal) consequences.

"The thing about these exoneration cases is that they all pertained to heinous crimes; that's why there was DNA evidence available. And so we wanted to determine why someone may be willing to falsely confess to one of those crimes," said Stephanie Madon, an ISU associate professor of psychology and the study's lead author. "We thought it might have to do with the pay-off structure of police interrogations. Some interrogation methods -- like physical isolation and the presentation of false evidence -- have immediate consequences for suspects that encourage them to confess. Though they also face consequences that encourage them to deny guilt -- such as the possibility of conviction and incarceration -- these consequences are more distal.

"So the suspect is weighing these two consequences at once and that's going to shape their behavior," she continued. "That's what we were interested in understanding. Which of these consequences is going to influence confession decisions -- those that are happening right now, or the ones that may happen in the future?"

----- (skipping)

The researchers say these results may help explain why some suspects confess to crimes in order to avoid a police interrogation -- even though they increase their risk of conviction and severe penalties by doing so. The study's authors theorize that innocent suspects so strongly believe that the truth will eventually be borne out, they may perceive the distal consequences facing them -- conviction, prison, or even a death sentence -- to be remote and unlikely.

..

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Sea ice extent in the Arctic lowest on record during January

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1751

----- (skipping)

January 2011 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent was the lowest on record in January, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This was the second consecutive month of record low extent. Satellite records extend back to 1979. The area of missing ice was about twice the size of Texas, or 60% the size of the Mediterranean Sea. Ice was notably absent in Northeast Canada and Western Greenland, and Hudson Bay did not freeze over until mid-January, more than a month later than usual. This was the latest freeze-up on record, and led to record warmth over much of Northeast Canada. Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island had its warmest January on record, 1.1°C above the previous record set in 1985. Weather records for the station go back to 1942.

----- (skipping)

..

Scheduled Deliveries Raise Risks for Mothers, Do Not Benefit Newborns

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218111817.htm

cienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2011) — Inducing labor without a medical reason is associated with negative outcomes for the mother, including increased rates of cesarean delivery, greater blood loss and an extended length of stay in the hospital, and does not provide any benefit for the newborn, according to a new study. As the number of scheduled deliveries continues to climb, it is important for physicians and mothers-to-be to understand the risks associated with elective induction.

----- (skipping)

..

Brain Function Linked to Birth Size; Study Sheds Light on Mental Health Problems Later in Life

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218111715.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2011) — Scientists have discovered the first evidence linking brain function variations between the left and right sides of the brain to size at birth and the weight of the placenta. The finding could shed new light on the causes of mental health problems in later life.

The research, conducted at the University of Southampton and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit at Southampton General Hospital, reveals that children who were born small, with relatively large placentas, showed more activity on the right side of their brains than the left. It is this pattern of brain activity that has been linked with mood disorders such as depression.

The study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that adverse environments experienced by fetuses during pregnancy (indicated by smaller birth size and larger placental size) can cause long-term changes in the function of the brain.

"The way we grow before birth is influenced by many things including what our mothers eat during pregnancy and how much stress they are experiencing. This can have long-lasting implications for our mental and physical health in later life," explains Dr Alexander Jones, an epidemiologist, who led the study at the University of Southampton.

----- (skipping)

..

Friday, February 18, 2011

The Republican Strategy

http://robertreich.org/post/3353591266

Thursday, February 17, 2011

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to shrink the pie even further with additional tax cuts for the rich – making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.

The strategy has three parts.

The battle over the federal budget.

The first is being played out in the budget battle in Washington. As they raise the alarm over deficit spending and simultaneously squeeze popular middle-class programs, Republicans want the majority of the American public to view it all as a giant zero-sum game among average Americans that some will have to lose.

----- (skipping)

The assault on public employees

The second part of the Republican strategy is being played out on the state level where public employees are being blamed for state budget crises. Unions didn’t cause these budget crises — state revenues dropped because of the Great Recession — but Republicans view them as opportunities to gut public employee unions, starting with teachers.

----- (skipping)

The demonizing of public employees is not only based on the lie that they’ve caused these budget crises, but it’s also premised on a second lie: that public employees earn more than private-sector workers. They don’t, when you take account of their education. In fact over the last fifteen years the pay of public-sector workers, including teachers, has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education – even including health and retirement benefits. Moreover, most public employees don’t have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year.

Bargaining rights for public employees haven’t caused state deficits to explode. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights, such as Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, are running big deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many states that give employees bargaining rights — Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana — have small deficits of less than 10 percent.

Republicans would rather go after teachers and other public employees than have us look at the pay of Wall Street traders, private-equity managers, and heads of hedge funds – many of whom wouldn’t have their jobs today were it not for the giant taxpayer-supported bailout, and most of whose lending and investing practices were the proximate cause of the Great Depression to begin with.

Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society – thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

The Distortion of the Constitution

The third part of the Republican strategy is being played out in the Supreme Court. It has politicized the Court more than at any time in recent memory.

Last year a majority of the justices determined that corporations have a right under the First Amendment to provide unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission is among the most patently political and legally grotesque decisions of our highest court – ranking right up there with Bush vs. Gore and Dred Scott.

Among those who voted in the affirmative were Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Both have become active strategists in the Republican party.

A month ago, for example, Antonin Scalia met in a closed-door session with Michele Bachman’s Tea Party caucus – something no justice concerned about maintaining the appearance of impartiality would ever have done.

Both Thomas and Scalia have participated in political retreats organized and hosted by multi-billionaire financier Charles Koch, a major contributor to the Tea Party and other conservative organizations, and a crusader for ending all limits on money in politics. (Not incidentally, Thomas’s wife is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization that has been receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to the Citizens United decision. On his obligatory financial disclosure filings, Thomas has repeatedly failed to list her sources of income over the last twenty years, nor even to include his own four-day retreats courtesy of Charles Koch.)

----- (skipping)

..

Dem Rep Receives Threat Over NASCAR Proposal

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/after-taking-on-nascar-dem-rep-is-threatened-document.php?ref=fpb

Evan McMorris-Santoro | February 17, 2011, 1:30PM

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) alerted Capitol Police Thursday after a threatening fax arrived at her office attacking her proposal to strip Pentagon sponsorship from NASCAR teams.

McCollum's staff tells TPM this is the first time they've alerted the police about a threat made against here office since the health care debate.

"Yo, Slut Betty," the fax, which arrived at McCollum's DC office Thursday morning, reads. "Shut Your Phucking Pie Hole!"

The fax then goes on to say that "without exception, Marxists are enemies of the Constitution" and "Death To All Marxists, Foreign And Domestic!"

Read the threatening fax, obtained exclusively by TPM, here. Warning: document contains extremely offensive language.

Team McCollum told TPM that they alerted police as soon as the fax arrived, and have yet to hear back from the department. McCollum's office does not know who sent the fax, or where it was sent from.

"We alerted Capitol Police this morning after we got the fax," Maria Reppas, communications director for McCollum, said. "We leave it to them to determine the threat level for pieces of correspondence such as this."

McCollum's proposal seeks to ban the military from spending taxpayer money on racing sponsorships. Currently, the Army sponsors a car in the NASCAR's Sprint Cup series to the tune of about $7 million per year.

McCollum contends that money -- which NASCAR says helps boost Army recruiting -- is wasted.

Since announcing the proposal, McCollum's office has received more than a few calls from irate NASCAR fans upset at what they perceive as a slight against their sport.

"We've had calls," Bill Harper, McCollum's Chief of Staff, told TPM. "Lots of Mississippi people, North Carolina people. We had a Florida person."

Asked what the callers say, Harper replied, "'Get your hands off my NASCAR', mostly."

Harper said he found it "ironic" that McCollum's amendment, which he said is the exact kind of government waste-cutting the new Republican majority has championed, is riling up NASCAR fans to the point of calling McCollum's office.

"We've heard innumerable times that the Republicans were elected to send a message from the people that we should stop spending money," he said. "And yet the people who sent that message want us to spend $7 million for a sticker on a NASCAR."

----- (skipping)

..

GOP State Senator Jane Cunningham Wants to Put Missouri Kids to Work

I read a study some years ago that found that young people who worked at low-paying jobs had a lowered work ethic, because of their experience that hard work bought such meager rewards.


http://www.addictinginfo.org/?p=1676

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Matthew Desmond

Jane Cunningham (R – West County) believes Missouri kids need to improve their work ethic so she’s sponsoring a bill (SB 222) that would repeal much of the state’s child labor laws.

According to the bill’s official summary, children under the age of 14 would no longer be barred from employment. They’d also be able to work all hours of the day, no longer need a work permit from their school and be able to work at motels and resorts so long as they’re given a place to lay their weary heads each night. Moreover, businesses that employ children would no longer be subject to inspections from the Division of Labor Standards.

----- (skipping)

..

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Help wanted — jobless need not apply

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110217/ts_yblog_thelookout/help-wanted-jobless-need-not-apply;_ylt=AtYvLLjvmBizDlDdbgXALmys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFpdXJqcDU1BHBvcwMzNQRzZWMDYWNjb3JkaW9uX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDaGVscHdhbnRlZDgy

Thu Feb 17, 8:58 am ET
By Zachary Roth

In 2008, Michelle, a 53-year-old Illinois resident with 19 years experience in information technology, became another casualty of the Great Recession. More than a year later, after a long and fruitless job search, she finally heard from a headhunter who thought she sounded like a great fit for a post he was looking to fill.

But when Michelle told him how long she had been out of work, the headhunter turned apologetic: His client, he said, wouldn't accept people who had been unemployed for more than six months. Michelle would go on to stay jobless for so long that she ultimately exhausted all her unemployment benefits, and, for the first time in her life, was forced to apply for food stamps and welfare.

Michelle's tale was recounted at a recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) meeting devoted to the issue of hiring discrimination against the unemployed. As the commission found, Michelle's experience is far from unique. No one officially tracks how many job openings explicitly bar the unemployed, but several news reports since last summer have uncovered numerous online job postings that require candidates be employed during the application process. One such listing was posted by the cellphone giant Sony Ericsson--a move the company later called a "mistake."

Job-placement professionals say that over the last year, more and more employers have made it clear they won't consider job candidates who aren't working. "A lot of our recruiters have had clients who have come across this," Matt Deutsch of TopEchelon.com, which brings recruiters together to collaborate in finding jobs for candidates, told The Lookout, calling the practice "unfortunate."

With the number of Americans who have been out of work for six months or longer at a whopping 6.2 million, and with 4.7 unemployed workers for every job opening, advocates for the jobless say this growing form of hiring discrimination creates another hurdle for the increasingly desperate ranks of the unemployed. "At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise," Christine Owens, who runs the National Employment Law Center, told the EEOC.

Some experts say that discrimination against the jobless, as currently practiced, may violate civil rights laws--a question the commission is now considering. In itself, such discrimination isn't illegal. (New Jersey is exploring legislation that would prohibit job ads telling the unemployed not to apply.) But it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or age. And African-Americans and older workers are disproportionately represented among the long-term unemployed--meaning they may be bearing the brunt of discrimination against the jobless.

----- (skipping)

..

Permafrost in name only — thaw adds to warming

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41625347/ns/us_news-environment/

By Miguel Llanos Reporter
msnbc.com msnbc.com
updated 2 hours 1 minute ago 2011-02-17T21:38:03

The permafrost capping the top of the world is irreversibly thawing and within two decades will release more carbon than it now absorbs, scientists calculate in a new study that makes this dire prediction: Up to 60 percent of Earth's permafrost will have thawed out by 2200.

Why care if you don't live in Siberia, Alaska or northern Canada, where thawing permafrost has already buckled roads and swallowed structures?

Because permafrost — which is ground that's been frozen continuously for two or more years — holds enormous amounts of carbon in the form of frozen plant matter, and adding more of that to the atmosphere would raise temperatures even higher, scientists say.

"The amount we expect to be released by permafrost is equivalent to half of the amount of carbon released since the dawn of the Industrial Age," Kevin Schaefer, lead author and a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a statement. "That is a lot of carbon."

Here's another way to look at it: The carbon predicted for release through 2200 is about one-fifth of the total amount in the atmosphere today.

Earlier studies have estimated the carbon released from the "active layer" of soil a few inches above the permafrost — soil that freezes and thaws in winter and summer.

But "ours is the first study to estimate how much carbon could be released from thawing permafrost and when," Schaefer told msnbc.com.

If anything, the estimate is very conservative, Schaefer says, because it doesn't include a known "feedback" mechanism: that permafrost carbon release will certainly add to warming, which in turn will accelerate the thawing and then even more carbon emissions.

----- (skipping)

..

Study links social security improvements to longer life span

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-02/nymc-sls021611.php

Public release date: 17-Feb-2011
[ Print | E-mail | Share Share ] [ Close Window ]

Contact: Donna E. Moriarty, M.P.H.
donna_moriarty@nymc.edu
914-439-5989
New York Medical College
Study links social security improvements to longer life span
When benefits are improved, older people benefit most

New findings from researchers at New York Medical College suggest that when Social Security benefits are improved, people over the age of 65 benefit most, and may even live longer.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, Americans over the age of 65 experienced steep declines in the rate of mortality in the periods that followed the founding of and subsequent improvements to Social Security. The authors urge that as Congress and the President discuss changes to Social Security they consider the benefit of reduced mortality and improved health among older Americans.

----- (skipping)

Arno—whose work is funded through a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation® Investigator Award in Health Policy Research—and his colleagues analyzed the effect of Social Security on mortality over the course of the 20th century. After controlling for factors such as changes in the economy, access to medical care, and Medicare, they found that although mortality rates for all adults fell during the 20th century, rates of decline for those 65 and older changed more than 50 percent in the decades following the introduction of Social Security in 1940. Rates of decline for the younger age groups remained virtually the same during this period. The trend was particularly pronounced following marked improvements in Social Security benefits between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s.

This finding supports earlier studies that have demonstrated that beneficiaries with higher lifetime earnings experienced lower mortality rates, and that higher supplemental security income benefit levels reduced mortality and disability for those recipients. Improved health status among elders could have other fiscal impacts, including lower Medicare costs.

..

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Responsibility for the Federal Budget Deficit

See link for graphs.

http://www.angrybearblog.com/2006/05/responsibility-for-federal-budget.html

Posted by Kash | 5/18/2006 10:16:00 AM
25 comments

I’ve taken the liberty of composing a picture that addresses the implausible notion that the Federal government’s budget deficits are the result of “ungoverned forces”.

The graph below shows the on-budget federal budget balance – that is, the budget balance excluding the Social Security Trust Fund surplus – and the ways in which various deliberate policy choices have contributed to it. The lower-most heavy red line shows the actual budget deficit that we’ve seen over the past several years, as well as the forecast for the remainder of the Bush presidency from the CBO (see the January 2006 report: Budget and Economic Outlook), including the recently-passed extension of the cut in capital gains taxes and AMT relief. Excluding the Social Security surplus, the deficit will be around $550bn this year, and will remain at that level for the rest of Bush's time in office. (Though it’s worth noting that if there’s a recession any time in the next three years the deficits will grow to be much larger.)

This deficit is then decomposed into various components that correspond to specific legislative changes made by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress over the past five years. The CBO estimates the cost of each change to tax laws and spending legislation, and provides those estimates in their regular “Budget Outlook” reports. I've compiled all of those cost estimates and put them together to make this graph.


----- (skipping)

If none of these deliberate changes to taxes and spending had happened – in other words, if tax laws had remained the same as they were in Clinton’s last year in office, discretionary spending had simply grown at the rate of inflation, Iraq had not been invaded, and entitlement programs had remained unchanged by new legislation – then the federal budget balance would have followed the top-most blue line instead of the bottom-most red line. Rather than a budget deficit of $494bn in 2005, the federal government would have run a surplus of $18bn. Rather than facing a future of massive and growing deficits as far as the eye can see, the US would be enjoying the prospect of being able pay down some of its national debt in preparation for the looming retirement costs of the baby boomers.

(If you’re worried that this analysis omits the positive revenue feedback effects of the tax cuts, you’re quite right – but as I’ve demonstrated before, those feedback effects are really tiny so we can safely ignore them.)

There are two crucial points to take from this picture. First, the Bush tax cuts are alone responsible for close to half of the Bush administration’s chronic and massive budget problem. The decision to dramatically increase defense spending, including the war in Iraq, accounts for most of the rest of the problem. As I’ve emphasized previously, increased non-defense discretionary spending is only a tiny contributor to today’s budget problem.

Second, it is quite clear that the deficit is entirely due to specific decisions made by the Bush administration and Congress.

..

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Extreme Income/Wealth Gap in the U.S.

See link for pictures.

http://www.truth-out.org/nine-pictures-of-the-extreme-incomewealth-gap67743

Monday 14 February 2011
by: Dave Johnson | Campaign for America's Future

Many people don’t understand our country’s problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don’t see it. People just don't understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people’s ability to comprehend.

----- (skipping)

Some Wall Street types (and others) make over a billion dollars a year – each year. How much is a billion dollars? How can you visualize an amount of money so high? Here is one way to think about it: The median income in the US is around $50,000, meaning half of us make less and half of us make more. If you make $50,000 a year, and don’t spend a single penny of it, it will take you 20,000 years to save a billion dollars.

----- (skipping)

This is a Maybach. Most people don’t even know there is something called a Maybach. The one in the picture, the Landaulet model, costs $1 million. (Rush Limbaugh, who has 5 homes in Palm Beach, drives a cheaper Maybach 57 S -- but makes up for it by owning 6 of them.)

Your $1 billion will only buy you a thousand Maybach Landaulets.

----- (skipping)

This is the Mardan Palace Hotel in Turkey, Burj Al Arab in Dubai.

Here is a photo gallery of some other expensive hotels, where people pay $20-30,000 per night. Yes, there are people who pay that much. Remember to send me a postcard!

A billion dollars will buy you a $20,000 room every night for 137 years.

----- (skipping)

Now you have a way to visualize just how much money is concentrated at the very top. And the concentration is increasing. The top 1% took in 23.5% of all of the country’s income in 2007. In 1979 they only took in 8.9%.

It is concentrating at the expense of the rest of us. Between 1979 and 2008, the top 5% of American families saw their real incomes increase 73%, according to Census data. Over the same period, the lowest-income fifth (20% of us) saw a decrease in real income of 4.1%. The rest were just stagnant or saw very little increase. This is why people are borrowing more and more, falling further and further behind. (From the Working Group on Extreme Inequality)

There are a few people who make hundreds of millions of income in a single year. Some people make more than $1 billion in a year But that is in a single year. If you make vast sums every year, after a while it starts to add up. (And then there is the story of inherited wealth, passed down and growing for generation after generation...)

Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined. "In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available from the Federal Reserve Board, the richest 1% of U.S. households owned 33.8% of the nation’s private wealth. That’s more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent." (Also from the Working Group on Extreme Inequality)

400 people have as much wealth as half of our population. The combined net worth of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans in 2007: $1.5 trillion. The combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion.

----- (skipping)

There is a problem of the effect on our democracy from the influence that extreme, concentrated wealth buys. In the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson make the case that the anti-democracy changes we have seen in America since the late 1970s that led to intense concentration of wealth and income are the intentional result of an organized campaign by the wealthy and businesses to use their wealth to, well, buy even more wealth.

The secretive Koch Brothers are said to have a net worth of $21.5 billion each and are particularly influential. They financed the Tea Party movement and along with big corporations and other billionaires they financed the massive assault of TV ads in the midterm elections that helped change the makeup of the Congress. And now Congress is paying them back,

Nine of the 12 new Republicans on the panel signed a pledge distributed by a Koch-founded advocacy group — Americans for Prosperity — to oppose the Obama administration's proposal to regulate greenhouse gases. Of the six GOP freshman lawmakers on the panel, five benefited from the group's separate advertising and grassroots activity during the 2010 campaign.

... Republicans on the committee have launched an agenda of the sort long backed by the Koch brothers. A top early goal: restricting the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the Kochs' core energy businesses.



..

Friday, February 11, 2011

US Chamber’s Lobbyists Solicited Hackers To Sabotage Unions, Smear Chamber’s Political Opponents

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/10/lobbyists-chamberleaks/

By Lee Fang at 4:30 pm

hinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

According to one document prepared by Team Themis, the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents.

----- (skipping)

..

Whales suffering from dramatic sunburn

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9173000/9173271.stm

Page last updated at 00:25 GMT, Wednesday, 10 November 2010
By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

By Victoria Gill
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

The Sun's rays can "burn" whales' skin, just like they can damage human skin, according to a team of researchers.

The scientists studied more than 150 whales in the Gulf of California.

By taking photographs and skin samples, the US and Mexico-based team found the whales had blisters that were caused by sun damage.

The report in the Royal Society journal, Proceedings B, concluded that darker skinned whales showed fewer signs of sun damage.

The team was interested in the effects of increasing levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation on wildlife.

----- (skipping)

"The increase in skin damage seen in blue whales is a matter of concern, but at this stage it is not clear what is causing this increase. A likely candidate is rising ultraviolet radiation as a result of either ozone depletion, or a change in the level of cloud cover."

----- (skipping)

"We predict that whales will experience more severe sun damage if ultraviolet radiation continues to increase."

----- (skipping)

..

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Common Insecticide Used in Homes Associated With Delayed Mental Development of Young Children

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110210103715.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2011) — When the EPA phased out the widespread residential use of chlorpyrifos and other organophosphorus (OP) insecticides in 2000-2001 because of risks to child neurodevelopment, these compounds were largely replaced with pyrethroid insecticides. But the safety of these replacement insecticides remained unclear, as they had never been evaluated for long-term neurotoxic effects after low-level exposure. In the first study to examine the effects of these compounds on humans and the first evaluation of their potential toxicity to the developing fetal brain, scientists of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found a significant association between piperonyl butoxide (PBO), a common additive in pyrethroid formulations, measured in personal air collected during the third trimester of pregnancy, and delayed mental development at 36 months.

----- (skipping)

PBO was detected in the majority of personal air samples (75%). While the results demonstrate that a significant prenatal exposure to permethrin in personal air and/or plasma was not associated with performance scores for the Bayley Mental Developmental Index or the Psychomotor Developmental Index at 36 months, children who were more highly exposed to PBO in personal air samples (≥4.34 ng/m3) scored 3.9 points lower on the Mental Developmental Index than those with lower exposures.

"This drop in IQ points is similar to that observed in response to lead exposure," said Megan Horton of the Mailman School of Public Health and lead researcher. "While perhaps not impacting an individual's overall function, it is educationally meaningful and could shift the distribution of children in the society who would be in need of early intervention services."

..

The real value of life on Earth

"New Scientist" magazine had an editorial that expresses my own feelings.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827863.200-the-real-value-of-life-on-earth.html

THE living world continues to astound us.

Only a few years ago biologists assumed that life could only thrive in Goldilocks conditions - not too hot, not too cold, with plenty of water and nutrients. We now know this isn't true: life can tolerate and even flourish in the most extreme conditions. There is barely a habitat on Earth that has not been colonised (see "Extreme survival: Life frozen solid").

----- (skipping)

Yet this sense of wonder is not reflected in attempts to protect life on Earth. The recent biodiversity negotiations in Nagoya, Japan, focused on the economic value of the living world. While that may be a pragmatic approach to saving life from destruction, we must never allow the bottom line to eclipse the value we place on life's exuberance.

Earth is the only inhabited planet we know of. It is our duty to care for it, for its own sake.

..

Still Hope for Arctic Sea Ice

I've republished this post because of the good comments someone has made.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110204092149.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2011) — The substantial decline of Arctic sea ice in recent years has triggered some fears that the ice cover might be approaching a "tipping point" beyond which the loss of the remaining sea ice would become unstoppable. However, new research carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg/Germany now indicates that such tipping point is unlikely to exist for the loss of Arctic summer sea ice. The sea-ice cover reacts instead relatively directly to the climatic conditions at any given time. Hence, the ongoing loss of Arctic sea ice could be slowed down and eventually stopped if global warming were to be slowed down and eventually stopped.

----- (skipping)

===================================================

There are some good comments for this post. I have tried to change my blog so that comments appear in-line, but I think I would have to go thru a conversion process which I haven't had time to do.

..

Gradual Trends and Extreme Events

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/gradual-trends-and-extreme-events/

February 8, 2011, 7:51 am

I’ve spent a lot of the last several days reading about climate change, extreme weather events, food prices, and so on. And one thing that became clear to me is that there’s widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common. What I’m about to say may seem obvious, because it is obvious, at least if you approach it the right way; but I still think it needs saying.

So, let’s start with an observation: weather varies. (Duh.) Heat waves and other stuff happens. Think of it in terms of a probability distribution for temperatures, with the area under the curve over some range representing the probability of temperatures in that range in a given place over a given period. And define an extreme event as a case in which the temperature exceeds some threshold. The the picture looks like this:

----- (see article for graph)

What happens is that the right tail gets fatter: the probability, and hence the frequency, of extreme events goes up.

Two immediate implications. First, there will still be cold stretches: global warming shifts the distribution, it doesn’t eliminate the left side of the distribution. So there will still be cold spells; that proves nothing.

Second, no individual weather event can properly be said to have been “caused” by global warming. Heat waves happened 30 years ago; there’s no way to prove that any individual heat wave now might not have happened even if we hadn’t emitted all that CO2.

But the pattern should have changed: we should be getting lots of record highs, and not as many record lows — which is exactly what we do see. And we should be seeing 100-year heat waves and similar events much more often than history would have suggested likely; again, that’s what we actually do see.

The point is that the usual casual denier arguments — it’s cold outside; you can’t prove that climate change did it — miss the point. What you’re looking for is a pattern. And that pattern is obvious.


..

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Transsexual differences caught on brain scan

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20032-transsexual-differences-caught-on-brain-scan.html

12:16 26 January 2011 by Jessica Hamzelou

Antonio Guillamon's team at the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, Spain, think they have found a better way to spot a transsexual brain. In a study due to be published next month, the team ran MRI scans on the brains of 18 female-to-male transsexual people who'd had no treatment and compared them with those of 24 males and 19 females.

They found significant differences between male and female brains in four regions of white matter – and the female-to-male transsexual people had white matter in these regions that resembled a male brain (Journal of Psychiatric Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2010.05.006). "It's the first time it has been shown that the brains of female-to-male transsexual people are masculinised," Guillamon says.

In a separate study, the team used the same technique to compare white matter in 18 male-to-female transsexual people with that in 19 males and 19 females. Surprisingly, in each transsexual person's brain the structure of the white matter in the four regions was halfway between that of the males and females (Journal of Psychiatric Research, DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2010.11.007). "Their brains are not completely masculinised and not completely feminised, but they still feel female," says Guillamon.


----- (skipping)

..

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Droughts, Floods and Food

The U.S. military has warned that global warming is a security threat to the U.S., because of food shortages causing political instability in other countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=1

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 6, 2011

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs.

The consequences of this food crisis go far beyond economics. After all, the big question about uprisings against corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East isn’t so much why they’re happening as why they’re happening now. And there’s little question that sky-high food prices have been an important trigger for popular rage.

So what’s behind the price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve, with at least one commentator declaring that there is “blood on Bernanke’s hands.” Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators, accusing them of “extortion and pillaging.”

But the evidence tells a different, much more ominous story. While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

----- (skipping)

Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that’s about: a record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.

The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?

To some extent we’re seeing the results of a natural phenomenon, La Niña — a periodic event in which water in the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal. And La Niña events have historically been associated with global food crises, including the crisis of 2007-8.

But that’s not the whole story. Don’t let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 was tied with 2005 for warmest year on record, even though we were at a solar minimum and La Niña was a cooling factor in the second half of the year. Temperature records were set not just in Russia but in no fewer than 19 countries, covering a fifth of the world’s land area. And both droughts and floods are natural consequences of a warming world: droughts because it’s hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water vapor.

As always, you can’t attribute any one weather event to greenhouse gases. But the pattern we’re seeing, with extreme highs and extreme weather in general becoming much more common, is just what you’d expect from climate change.

..

Feeding babies solids too early may make fat toddlers

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/07/feeding-babies-solids-too-early-may-make-fat-toddlers/?hpt=Sbin

February 7th, 2011

Feeding a baby solid foods too early in life may increase his risk of becoming obese before reaching preschool, according to a new study in Pediatrics.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that new mothers breast-feed their babies for at least six months and introduce solid foods between 4 and 6 months. This new study finds that among formula-fed babies, those who were given solid foods before age 4 months had a higher risk of becoming obese.

The study compared obesity rates among 847 3-year-olds. Researchers found that among children who were breast-fed for at least four months, the timing of solid-food introduction did not affect their odds of becoming obese at age 3. But among babies who were formula fed or who stopped breast-feeding before the age of 4 months, introducing solid food before 4 months was linked to a sixfold increase in the odds of that child becoming obese by age 3.

----- (skipping)

..

Children gain weight when mothers work

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110204091250.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2011) — Childhood obesity in the United States has more than tripled in the past three decades, and prior research has linked maternal employment to children's body mass index (BMI), a measure of their weight-for-height. A new study in the January/February issue of the journal Child Development has found that children's BMI rose the more years their mothers worked over their children's lifetimes.

----- (skipping)

The researchers found that the total number of years mothers were employed had a small but cumulative influence on their children's BMI, which, over time, can lead to an increase in the likelihood of overweight or obesity. The findings were strongest among children in 5th and 6th grades. Surprisingly, changes in children's physical activity, time spent unsupervised, and time spent watching TV didn't explain the link between maternal employment and children's BMI. Moreover, the time of day moms worked wasn't significantly associated with children's BMI.

----- (skipping)
..

HPV Vaccine Works for Boys

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110204142257.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2011) — The vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) can prevent 90 percent of genital warts in men when offered before exposure to the four HPV strains covered by the vaccine, according to a new multi-center study led by H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and UCSF.

The four-year, international clinical trial, which also found a nearly 66 percent effectiveness in the general population of young men regardless of prior exposure to these strains, provides the first reported results of using the HPV vaccine as a prophylactic in men.

Initial data from this study informed the Food and Drug Administration's decision to approve the vaccine for boys in 2009 to prevent warts, while results from a substudy led the FDA to expand approval late last year to prevent anal cancer. Findings can be found in the Feb. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

----- (skipping)

..

Choosing Not to Lead by Example

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_02/027880.php

February 7, 2011

CHOOSING NOT TO LEAD BY EXAMPLE.... The disconnect between congressional Republicans' rhetoric and the policies they impose on themselves is often hard to overlook. They like to complain, for example, about the size of the federal workforce and partisan perceptions about soaring public-sector wages, while at the same time, boosting the payroll of their own aides.

A similar problem is unfolding when it comes to spending on government agencies -- GOP officials want to slash budgets across the public sector, while choosing not to make big cuts to Congress' budget.

Republicans now running the House are barely touching Congress' own generous budget even as they take a cleaver to many domestic agencies.

A new GOP proposal would reduce domestic agencies' spending by 9 percent on average through September, when the current budget year ends.

If that plan becomes law, it could lead to layoffs of tens of thousands of federal employees, big cuts to heating and housing subsidies for the poor, reduced grants to schools and law enforcement agencies, and a major hit to the Internal Revenue Service's budget.

Congress, on the other hand, would get nicked by only 2 percent, or $94 million.
----- (skipping)

..

Monday, February 07, 2011

Around and around

My most recent poem/song "Forged in the Stars", contains the lines:
flung into space, alone in the dark,
around and around in the night.

I was thinking of the atoms going around the sun. It's neat to see it can also refer to them spinning around.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19955-spinning-cosmic-dust-motes-set-speed-record.html

12 January 2011 by David Shiga

Some dust grains out in deep space are spinning at mind-boggling rates. According to data from the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, these interstellar particles are turning on their axis tens of billions of times every second.

The measurements, which set a record for spinning objects, could lead to a more accurate map of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang, by allowing scientists to better account for distortions caused by microwaves emitted by the grains.

The smallest grains, only 100 atoms or so wide, are so light that they can be set spinning by collisions with photons and fast-moving atoms. "Atoms or photons that come along knock the hell out of them," says Charles Lawrence of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a member of the Planck science team.

----- (skipping)

..

The Smallest Tax Burden in Generations

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_02/027883.php

If I had to guess, I'd say most Americans think the government collects too much money in taxes. Indeed, despite an enormous deficit they claim to care deeply about, congressional Republicans are nearly unanimous in their belief that raising any taxes on anyone by any amount is entirely unacceptable -- because Americans are "taxed enough already."

With that in mind, today's AP report on tax burdens probably won't be well received on the right, but that doesn't make it wrong. (thanks to reader R.S. for the tip)

Taxes too high?

Actually, as a share of the nation's economy, Uncle Sam's take this year will be the lowest since 1950, when the Korean War was just getting under way.

And for the third straight year, American families and businesses will pay less in federal taxes than they did under former President George W. Bush, thanks to a weak economy and a growing number of tax breaks for the wealthy and poor alike.

Income tax payments this year will be nearly 13 percent lower than they were in 2008, the last full year of the Bush presidency. Corporate taxes will be lower by a third, according to projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

There are multiple factors that contribute to this, including the weak economy that holds down income. But it's also the result of very low tax rates, coupled with, as the AP noted, "a tax code that grows each year with new deductions, credits and exemptions."

The result is an economy with federal tax receipts equal to just 14.8% of the economy -- the lowest level since the Truman era.

Of course, this is only looking at federal taxes, and doesn't reflect state and local taxes, but a USA Today analysis found last year that if we include everything -- federal, state, and local taxes, including income, property, sales, and other taxes -- the percentage of personal income that's paid in taxes is still at its lowest level since 1950.

As Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the Center for American Progress, said at the time, "The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts."

----- (skipping)

..

Normal Air Could Halve Fuel Consumption

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110207073942.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2011) — Every time a car brakes, energy is generated. At present this energy is not used, but new research shows that it is perfectly possible to save it for later use in the form of compressed air. It can then provide extra power to the engine when the car is started and save fuel by avoiding idle operation when the car is at a standstill.

Air hybrids, or pneumatic hybrids as they are also known, are not yet in production. Nonetheless, electric cars and electric hybrid cars already make use of the brake energy, to power a generator that charges the batteries. However, according to Per Tunestål, a researcher in Combustion Engines at Lund University in Sweden, air hybrids would be much cheaper to manufacture. The step to commercialisation does not have to be a large one.

"The technology is fully realistic. I was recently contacted by a vehicle manufacturer in India which wanted to start making air hybrids," he says.

The technology is particularly attractive for jerky and slow driving, for example for buses in urban traffic.

"My simulations show that buses in cities could reduce their fuel consumption by 60 per cent," says Sasa Trajkovic, a doctoral student in Combustion Engines at Lund University who recently defended a thesis on the subject.

----- (skipping)

..

What poor people need in a food pantry box

http://www.gaylecrabtree.com/2010/07/what-poor-people-need-in-food-pantry.html?spref=fb

----- (skipping)

Please remember that what goes into a box is based on what is donated. Often these come to a pantry from a food bank. All items are helpful but some are more helpful than others. Don't let it stop you from donating if you can't get an item that's listed below. Truly, every little bit helps.

* People who receive food pantry boxes benefit most from items they can make a meal from. Examples would be canned or powered milk with a box of cereal, peanut butter with bread or crackers or spaghetti sauce and pasta.
* Cans of soup are good but can usually only feed one person. The large envelopes that contain enough for a family are even better.
* The item people most like to donate is veggies. It's no coincidence that it's also the basis of many food boxes. Flour, corn meal and cooking oil can help put a meal together. So can beans and rice. A casserole in a box that contains everything needed for a meal is better than a box of Hamburger Helper.
* Moms often appreciate sugar drink mixes such as Kool-aid. This goes farther than soda and gives kids a change from water. It's also not likely to be donated to bee given in a food pantry box.
* Cans of fruit are good. The best varieties are the ones kids are most likely to eat.
* What poor people need in a food box contain luxuries that we usually take for granted. Toilet paper, paper towels, soap, dishwashing liquid, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste are not covered by food stamps. Not every food pantry accepts these donations. Many do. Call the charity of your choice to double check before donating items.
* Macaroni and cheese is always good. The macaroni and cheese that doesn't need milk or butter are better than the ones that do.


..

Working More Than 20 Hours a Week in High School Found Harmful

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110204091248.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2011) — Many teens work part-time during the school year, and in the current economic climate, more youths may take jobs to help out with family finances. But caution is advised: Among high school students, working more than 20 hours a week during the school year can lead to academic and behavior problems.

----- (skipping)

The researchers found that working for more than 20 hours a week was associated with declines in school engagement and how far adolescents were expected to go in school, and increases in problem behavior such as stealing, carrying a weapon, and using alcohol and illegal drugs. They also found that things didn't get better when teens who were working more than 20 hours a week cut back their hours or stopped working altogether. In contrast, working 20 hours or less a week had negligible academic, psychological, or behavioral effects.

----- (skipping)

..

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Lead Exposure May Affect Blood Pressure During Pregnancy

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110205142846.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2011) — Even minute amounts of lead may take a toll on pregnant women, according to a study published by Lynn Goldman, M.D., M.S., M.P.H., Dean of George Washington University's School of Public Health and Health Services in D.C., and colleagues, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Although the levels of lead in the women's blood remained far below thresholds set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, women carrying more lead had significantly higher blood pressure.

"We didn't expect to see effects at such low levels of lead exposure," says Goldman, "but in fact we found a strong effect." If confirmed, this would indicate that pregnant women may be as sensitive to lead toxicity as young children.

Blood pressure is slightly higher during pregnancy, child labor, and delivery as the heart pumps harder. But prolonged high blood pressure during pregnancy (pregnancy-induced hypertension) can lead to complications called preeclampsia and then eclampsia. This potentially lethal condition also can predispose women to a heart attack in their future. While any increase in blood pressure during pregnancy is worrisome, the study did not find an association between lead and pregnancy-induced hypertension or preeclampsia.

----- (skipping)

..

Saturday, February 05, 2011

arly Childhood Education Program Yields High Economic Returns

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110204091258.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2011) — For every $1 invested in a Chicago early childhood education program, nearly $11 is projected to return to society over the children's lifetimes -- equivalent to an 18 percent annual return on program investment, according to a study led by University of Minnesota professor of child development Arthur Reynolds in the College of Education and Human Development.

----- (skipping)

Children at higher levels of risk experienced the highest economic benefits, including males ($17.88 per dollar invested; a 22% annual return), children who had taken part in preschool for a year ($13.58 per dollar invested; a 21% annual return) and children from higher-risk families, including those whose parents had not graduated from high school ($15.88 per dollar invested; a 20% annual return).

The researchers identified five key principles of the CPC that they say led to its effectiveness, including providing services that are of sufficient length or duration, are high in intensity and enrichment, feature small class sizes and teacher-student ratios, are comprehensive in scope and are implemented by well-trained and well-compensated staff. A further unique feature of the research is that the origin of the economic returns can be empirically traced through a chain of early educational advantages to cumulate in long-term effects.

----- (skipping)

..

Benefits of Outdoor Exercise Confirmed

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110204130607.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2011) — A systematic review carried out by a team at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry has analysed existing studies and concluded that there are benefits to mental and physical well-being from taking exercise in the natural environment. Their findings are published in the research journal Environmental Science and Technology on February 4th 2011.

----- (skipping)

..

Friday, February 04, 2011

The Great British austerity experiment

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/02/the-great-british-austerity-experiment.html

references the following article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/01/economy-economics

The Great British austerity experiment

With deficit hawks poised in the US, we watch with great interest UK economic policy. It's not looking an enviable example so far

Three months ago, I noted that the United States might benefit from the pain being suffered by the citizens of the United Kingdom. The reason was the new coalition government's commitment to prosperity through austerity. As predicted, this looks very much like a path to pain and stagnation, not healthy growth.

That's bad news for the citizens of the United Kingdom. They will be forced to suffer through years of unnecessarily high unemployment. They will also have to endure cutbacks in support for important public services like healthcare and education.

But the pain for the people in England could provide a useful example for the United States. After failing to see the $8tn housing bubble that wrecked the US economy, the austerity crew in the United States has been newly emboldened by the hugely partisan media that desperately want to eviscerate the country's bedrock social programmes: social security and Medicare.

The elite media and the politicians whom they promote would love to see the United States follow the austerity path of the UK's new government. However, if this path takes the UK into dangerous economic waters, it could provide a powerful warning to the public in the United States before we make the same mistake.

The British economy looks like it is doing its part. The fourth-quarter GDP report showing that the economy went into reverse and shrank at a 2.0% annual rate is exactly the sort of warning that many of us here were expecting. Weather-related factors may have slowed growth some, but you would have to do some serious violence to the data to paint a positive picture. Of course, the austerity in the UK is just beginning. There will likely be much worse pain to come, with a real possibility that the country will experience a double-dip recession, or at least a prolonged period of stagnation.

While the UK seems to be doing its part, the key question is whether anyone in the United States is prepared to take the lesson. Prior to this episode, there was already a solid economic case that large public deficits were necessary to support the economy in the period following the collapse of an asset bubble. The point is simply that the private sector is not prepared to make up the demand gap, at least in the short term. Both short-term and long-term interest rates are pretty much as low as they can be.


----- (skipping) (I recommend reading the whole article)

..

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

GOP Redefines Rape

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/wasserman-schultz-gop-rape-violent-women/

By Sahil Kapur
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 -- 8:23 am

WASHINGTON – Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) on Monday tore into House Republicans for proposing legislation that would limit access to abortion coverage for some rape victims.

The Florida Democrat, a rising star in her party and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, is a leading voice on women's issues. And she didn't mince her words in an interview with Raw Story, fiercely denouncing GOP colleagues over H.R. 3, the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act."

"It is absolutely outrageous," Wasserman Schultz said in an exclusive interview late Monday afternoon. "I consider the proposal of this bill a violent act against women."

The broad anti-abortion measure would restrict federally-assisted abortion coverage to cases of "forcible rape," excluding in that definition instances where women are drugged and raped, where women say "no" but do not physically fight off the perpetrator, and various cases of date rape. It also excludes instances of statutory rape in which minors are impregnated by adults. The victim in all cases would be denied abortion coverage under Medicaid and forbidden from seeking health care tax benefits.

Introduced by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the bill boasts 173 mainly Republican co-sponsors and has been designated a top priority by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

----- (skipping)

So it's not a problem if a doctor rapes a woman who is under anesthesia? Or a 90-pound,8-year child's life is in danger because he father impregnated her with twins?

..

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Does money make you happy? Absolutely

http://lifeinc.todayshow.com/_news/2011/02/01/5961656-does-money-make-you-happy-absolutely-

saw about money and happiness. Apparently, money can purchase a whole lot of happiness.

After poring over data from 140 countries, researchers from The Wharton School concluded that the more money you have, the more satisfied you are with life – and that relationship holds true whether you are a citizen of the United States or of Burundi. As it turns out, the happiness effect isn’t relative; it’s based on a person’s absolute income.

What that means is that your happiness is very dependent on the economic prosperity of the country in which you live. As a general rule, the wealthier a nation is, the happier its citizens are.

----- (skipping)

Wolfers and his colleagues also looked at changes in happiness over time. They found that, as a general rule, citizens of countries that were experiencing economic growth tended to become happier with time. But not in the United States.

Wolfers explains: “That may be because all the income growth went to the very rich. So only a small number of people got richer.”

This might be a good reason for nations to make sure they share the wealth. Perhaps if the standard of living in Egypt and Tunisia were higher, things would be quieter there.

..

Debts Should be Honored, Except When the Money is Owed to Working People

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/debts-should-be-honored-except-when-the-money-is-owed-to-working-people

Dean Baker
Truthout, January 31, 2011

This seems to be the lesson that our nation’s leaders are trying to pound home to us. According to the New York Times, members of Congress are secretly running around in closets and back alleys working up a law allowing states to declare bankruptcy.

According to the article, a main goal of state bankruptcy is to allow states to default on their pension obligations. This means that states will be able to tell workers, including those already retired, that they are out of luck. Teachers, highway patrol officers and other government employees, some of whom worked decades for the government, will be told that their contracts no longer mean anything. They will not get the pensions that they were expecting.

Depending on the specific circumstances, they may find their pensions cut back 20 percent, 30 percent, perhaps even 50 percent. There would be no guarantees if a state goes into bankruptcy.

There has been a concerted effort to bash public sector employees by either highlighting the few instances where pensions actually are exorbitant or just making things up. Untruths about Goldman Sachs, General Electric or any other major company rarely appear in the media, and are usually quickly corrected when they do. However, exaggerations or outright fabrication are a standard practice for those who report on state and local budgets when it comes to public employees.

The public has been bombarded with stories of public employees retiring with six-figure pensions while still in their early 50s. There may be some instances of such inflated pensions, but that is far from the typical story. If we look to New York State, the hotbed of bloated public budgets, we find that the state’s main retirement system pays an average pension of $18,300 a year. For many workers this is their whole retirement income since they were not covered by Social Security.

This is the general story of public pensions. Public sector workers are often better situated than their private sector counterparts, in that they even have pensions. But study after study shows that these workers paid for their pensions with lower wages than their private sector counterparts. It is tragic that so many private sector workers cannot count on a secure retirement, but it won’t help them to make workers in the public sector equally insecure.

And, there is the matter of paying debts. State governments are legally obligated to pay retirees the pensions they worked for just like any other debt. It is fascinating to see the interest by many pro-business conservative types in defaulting on this debt.

Many of these same people have been determined to argue that homeowners who are underwater in their mortgages should pay their debts. They certainly have not been offering them any assistance in staying in their homes.

In fact, back in 2005, some of the same crew were busy re-writing the bankruptcy law. They wanted to make it harder for individuals to get out of their debt through bankruptcy. They felt it was so important the people paid their debts to credit card companies and other lenders that they actually applied the law retroactively. People who took out debt under one set of bankruptcy rules suddenly found that Congress had changed the rules after the fact and they would now be subjected to a much harsher set of bankruptcy rules.

----- (skipping)

There certainly seems to be a pattern here. The story has nothing to do with preferences for the market or government intervention. The picture here is very simple: The rules get changed whenever it is necessary to make sure that money flows upward from ordinary workers to the rich. In 21st century America, upward redistribution seems to be the guiding principle.

..

75-Year Prison Sentence for Taping the Police?

This is outrageous.
And I don't agree with the laws making it a crime to record your own conversation w/o the other person's knowledge. How else can you prove things like abuse from the police or an employer?

http://www.alternet.org/rights/149706/75-year_prison_sentence_for_taping_the_police_the_absurd_laws_that_criminalize_audio_and_video_recording_in_america/

January 28, 2011 |

Last January, Michael Allison, a 41-year-old mechanic from Bridgeport, Illinois, went to court to protest what he saw as unfair treatment from local police officers.

----- (skipping)

Allison sued the city of Bridgeport in 2007, arguing that the eyesore law violated his civil rights and that the city was merely trying to bilk revenues from impound fees. This apparently enraged the local police, who, Allison alleges, began harassing him at home and threatening arrest when Allison refused to get rid of his cars.

Shortly before his January 2010 court date, Allison requested a court reporter for the hearing, making it clear to the county clerk that if one was not present he would record the proceedings himself.

With the request for a court reporter denied, Allison made good on his promise to bring his own audio recorder with him to the courthouse. Here's what happened next, as reported by Radley Bilko in the latest issue of Reason magazine:

Allison responded that he had no idea it was illegal to record public officials during the course of their work, that there was no sign or notice barring tape recorders in the courtroom, and that he brought one only because his request for a court reporter had been denied. No matter: After Harrell found him guilty of violating the car ordinance, Allison, who had no prior criminal record, was hit with five counts of wiretapping, each punishable by four to 15 years in prison. Harrell threw him in jail, setting bail at $35,000.

That's up to 75 years in prison for breaking a law Allison did not know existed, and which he violated in the name of protecting himself from what he saw as an injustice.

----- (skipping)


..