04.14.08
Farm subsidies: lots and lots of money wasted
Take a look—and that’s money that could go toward creating a good national healthcare program.
BILL MOYERS JOURNAL teams up with the PBS series EXPOSÉ: AMERICA’S INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS to follow the trail of WASHINGTON POST reporters who uncovered more than $15 billion in “wasteful, unnecessary, or redundant expenditures” farm subsidies that have flowed from Washington.
Watch Video
Read Transcript
CommentTHE WASHINGTON POST reporters focused for more than a year on tracking the path of farm subsidies — subsidies which between 2001 and 2006 amounted to more than $95 billion. THE WASHINGTON POST reported: “In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare.”
Of course many of these subsidies are not, “wasteful, unnecessary, or redundant expenditures.” EXPOSÉ on THE JOURNAL focuses on two aspects of THE WASHINGTON POST investigation:
- “1.3 Billion to People Who Don’t Farm“
The largest annual subsidy, called direct and countercyclical payments, is given to farmers regardless of what crops they grow — or whether they grow anything at all. The POST found that, since 2001, at least $1.3 billion was paid to landowners who had planted nothing since 2000. Among the beneficiaries were homeowners in new developments whose backyards used to be rice fields.- “No Drought Required For Federal Drought Aid“
A 2002 program aimed at helping those facing a serious drought gave $635 million to ranchers and dairy farmers who had moderate or no drought. Some ranchers got money because they lived in counties declared disaster areas after debris fell to earth from the space shuttle Columbia.Find out more from EXPOSÉ, and delve into the current debate over reauthorizing The Farm Bill.
Stunning photos—and statistics
Water loss—and we’re talking billions of gallons of water. Click the link to see a read. Just a snippet:
Delivering safe, healthy water has been one of the main functions of government for as long as there have been governments, building aqueducts in Roman times and more recently across the Harlem River. Water is also political, as we have seen from Atlanta to Wisconsin this year. But that hasn’t stopped our current governments from letting the infrastructure fall to ruin.
Two hours north of New York City, there is a lovely stream and marsh where people come to drink the cool, fresh water; in fact is is a leak of 36 million gallons a day from the Delaware Aqueduct, a billion gallons a month. (nor is this news, Andy Revkin wrote about it in 2002)
Now we’re talking: free math courses
About time: free math courses, and the top 10 are list below. Also at the link: articles and other useful info.
#1 MIT
- The Art of Counting
- Algebra I Course
- Algebra II Course
- Geometry Course
- Calculus Course
- Mathematics for Computer Science
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers so many free mathematics courses online, that it would be difficult to post them all here. But with more than 100 courses to choose from, MIT definitely belongs at the top of this list. Most of the school’s free math courses include lectures, assignments, exams and a wide array of multimedia materials.
#2 The Open University
Britain’s renowned Open University offers nearly 30 free mathematics courses online. From basic math to working your own math, The Open University has you covered. Most courses are text based and can be viewed online or downloaded to your computer.
#3 UMass, Boston
The Mathematics Department of the University of Massachusetts, Boston provides several high-quality calculus courses that provide complete instruction for students at any level. All three of the free courses feature multiple lessons, calculus problems, assignments and tests.
Obama responds directly
Via Reality Based Community, where Mark Kleiman points out:
When it comes to most politicians, if you can get them angry they’ll say dumb things and just dig the hole deeper. But Barack Obama knows how to use his anger. It’s not a pretty sight, if you’re the target.
The Torture President
Bush has now admitted that he personally approved the use of torture on prisoners, and Dan Froomkin has a column about it that you really should read. Bush has thus admitted that he (and the White House leadership including Cheney, Addington, Rice, Gonzales, and Ashcroft) are war criminals, as defined by law. Read Froomkin’s column today.
I understand that some people approve of torture (provided it’s not them, of course), but that doesn’t change the law.
UPDATE: Just to clarify: some people approve of burglary and even go so far to burglarize houses. When caught, those people are tried, and if the evidence supports it, are convicted and go to jail. Their approval of their own actions is irrelevant. So, too, it is with the President. He may well approve of torture. But if he directs and approves torture of prisoners, he has committed war crimes, and should be tried accordingly. Of course, Cheney, Addington, Yoo, et al., believe in some sort of “divine right of presidents” that places the President above the law, which is nonsense. If the President wants to legally torture people, he must get Congress to pass a law allowing it and breaking the treaties we’ve signed forbidding it. Obviously, Bush didn’t want to do this, probably because he knows the American public on the whole would never tolerate a government program of torture, especially one that allows the President to torture whomever he wants, regardless of whether they’ve broken a law or taken up arms against the US or not.
Froomkin’s column begins:
How we arrange for torture
The rendition program is really a torture program. Joanne Mariner, an attorney with Human Rights Watch, is the author of the new report, “Double Jeopardy: CIA renditions to Jordan.” The following article is based on that report.
“Why Jordan?” The question puzzled Abu Hamza al-Tabuki, a Saudi citizen who claims that US agents arrested him in Afghanistan in December 2001 and, after interrogating him in Pakistan, flew him in a private jet to Jordan. Because he was not Jordanian and had no past connection to Jordan, he did not understand why he was sent there.
“Why wasn’t I sent to America since I was arrested by Americans?” al-Tabuki asked, in a narrative he sent to contacts in Jordan after he was released.
The best answer to al-Tabuki’s question can probably be found in the directives, memoranda, and internal cables that relate to the CIA’s rendition program, many of which remain classified. The documents of this sort that have been released publicly not only assert that normal human rights rules do not apply in the “war on terrorism,” they purport to authorize torture.
The statements of current and former US officials are another good, albeit conflicting source of information. While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has insisted that the United States “does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture,” other officials have told a very different story.
Cofer Black, who served as the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center from 1999 until May 2002, did not mince words in giving his perspective. Describing the detention of “terrorists and their supporters,” he said that “there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.”
Why were detainees like al-Tabuki sent to Jordan? Human Rights Watch has just released a report on CIA renditions to Jordan that details more than a dozen rendition cases. The report concludes that nearly all of the detainees whom the CIA transferred to Jordanian custody were subject to interrogation using torture. The Jordanians, the report explains, served as proxy jailers and interrogators for the CIA.
Fixing the Constitution
The US Constitution was necessarily a hash of compromises. One notorious example is the US Senate with its highly disproportionate representation: 2 Senators regardless of state population. Thus the 23 smallest states, representing 13.6% of the population, have 46 Senators (46% of Sentaors), while the 27 largest states, with 86.4% of the population, have 54 Senators. (Thirty states—60 US Senators, a filibuster-proof majority—represent just 24% of the US population. 24% of the people elect 60% of the Senators.) (State info here.)
If we grouped by race instead of residence, to make the contrast more vivid, what would it be like if African-Americans (13.8% of the population) had 46 Senate seats?
So this article, on how we might alter the government, is of interest. It’s by Vikram David Amar, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. He is a 1988 graduate of the Yale Law School, and a former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun. He is a co-author, along with William Cohen and Jonathan Varat, of a major constitutional law casebook, and a co-author of several volumes of the Wright & Miller treatise on federal practice and procedure.
Constitutional lawyers and professors are not the only ones who write about improving our constitutional framework. And people who care about the Constitution (which should include all Americans) benefit by reading and considering the works of people from fields other than constitutional law, perhaps especially political science.
In today’s column, I’ll discuss some ideas of University of Virginia Political Scientist Larry J. Sabato developed in his recently published book, A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country. In particular, I’ll focus on Sabato’s proposal to more than double the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Professor Sabato’s Ambitious Prescriptions and the Call for a Constitutional Convention
In A More Perfect Constitution, Sabato offers discrete proposals for rewriting our Constitution to make our electoral process and government more sensible and more equitable. (Professor Sabato actually offers 22, rather than 23, specific proposals regarding governmental processes, for his last proposal is that America convene a new constitutional convention to consider rewriting the document to incorporate some or all of his other substantive ideas.)
The vast majority of Sabato’s suggestions deal with the mechanisms by which federal legislators and executive and judicial officers are selected and retained. Professor Sabato wants, among other things, to “grant[] the ten states with the greatest population two additional senators and the next fifteen states one additional senator each,” “[m]andate nonpartisan redistricting for House elections,” “[c]hange congressional terms by lengthening House terms to three years,” “[e]xpand the size of the House to approximately 1,000 members,” “establish generous term limits for representatives and senators,” “[c]reate a Continuity of Government procedure” for the temporary appointment of House members in the event of catastrophe, and lengthen the president’s term to six years, including a “fifth-year extension referendum – that is, an up-or-down confirmation election – which could result in an additional two years in office for the president.”
Lies and bias in school textbook
From the Center for American Progress, in an email:
Last week, the Center for Inquiry, a Hudson, NY think tank, announced that “a civics textbook used in many secondary schools around the country contains inaccurate and misleading statements, in particular in its analysis of certain constitutional law issues, including school prayer, and global warming.” The Center had been notified by Matthew LaClair of Kearny, NJ, a high school senior whose Advanced Placement (AP) Government class uses American Government, written by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio, Jr. The Center’s critique is forcing the book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, and the College Board (which runs the AP program) to review the book, now in its 11th edition. According to President Bush, Wilson “may be the most influential political scientist in America” and DiIulio is “one of the most influential social entrepreneurs in America.” Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. DiIulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor, was the first head of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives but later became disillusioned with the “Mayberry Machiavellis” inside the White House. By co-authorizing this textbook, DiIulio threatens to jeopardize his impressive academic record on criminal justice and American public life.
GLOBAL WARMING ‘ACTIVISTS’: The Associated Press reported that LaClair “was particularly upset about the book’s treatment of global warming.” It is no wonder: the 10th edition he and students across the nation are now using has “a large number of clearly erroneous statements.” The book claims that “the scientific community is divided over the issue” and that “activist scientists say that the earth is getting warmer; skeptical ones note that the earth’s atmosphere has been getting cooler.” Furthermore, it claims, “Science doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all.” Environmentalists are portrayed as “elites who often base their arguments on ideology as much as facts.” The section on global warming is illustrated, without explanation, by a photograph of a snowstorm. Despite the publisher’s claims that the 11th edition was revised to “reflect current developments in environmental policy research,” there are no new citations. Additionally, the revised text still questions the human impact on global warming and misrepresents its effects. Friends of the Earth has launched an e-mail campaign to Houghton Mifflin, and esteemed climate scientists Dr. James Hansen of NASA and Dr. Michael MacCracken have already written to the publisher to voice their objections.
Nonconformists and conformity
Earlier I blogged about a NY Times article on conformity and individualism. The blog Overcoming Bias has a very interesting post on that article:
Robin posted earlier about a NYT Magazine article on conformity. I was able to find an online copy of the scientific paper here: http://psr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/10/1/2.
The synopsis from the NYT is not complete. Of the 12 times that people were challenged to disagree with the social consensus, the most popular choice was to agree 0 times. 25% of the subjects did this. The second most common was to agree 3 times, done by 14%. Third most common was agreeing 8 times, 11%. Only 5% went along with the crowd all 12 times.
I think it’s quite significant that 25% of subjects never went along with the crowd and stuck to their own perceptions. In total, only 32% of the answers were wrong.
I’m not sure I follow Robin’s comments on this. It seems to me that this re-interpretation of the classic experiment suggests that people are not as conformist as generally thought. That would mean that we do more than merely give lip service to celebrating independence, that culturally we are quite effective at following the ideal of independent thinking.
The key question is, what is the right thing to do here? Should one conform when presented with 8 people denying the evidence of one’s own senses? I argue that it is the right thing to do.
Now of course, if you know you’re in a psychological experiment, maybe you can’t help but be suspicious that something fishy is going on. But in general, in real life, if 8 people come in and tell you that your perceptions are completely wrong, you should take it very seriously. I imagine that in the history of the world, in the great majority of such situations, the 8 were right and the one was wrong. As an example that some may be familiar with, if a bunch of friends come in and tell you you’re drinking too much, while your perception is that you can easily handle the alcohol, you should probably listen to them.
I would suggest that conformity is the right thing to do in these situations, and to that extent I am rather dismayed that the subjects were as non-conformist as this data shows.
Magical thinking
Psychology Today has an interesting article on magical thinking—a kind of thinking that seems inescapably endemic to humanity. Since it’s here to stay, it’s good to understand it as best we can so that we can curb its power and restrict its influence.
Jill Taylor’s TED Talk
This is amazing. Please watch.
The downside of casino gambling
The NY Times Magazine has an excellent article on the downside of casino gambling—and it’s a big downside. From the article:
… If a state wants to get involved in a business, why does it have to pick a vice like gambling? Why can’t it run, say, a chain of ice-cream parlors? The answer is that collecting huge fees or taxes requires huge profits. Huge profits require monopolies (or oligopolies). Yet no mainstream politician today defends monopoly on economic grounds. Someone who proposed shuttering every Ben & Jerry’s in Massachusetts in order to make way for a state ice-cream scheme would be dismissed as unhinged. The only grounds for setting up a gambling monopoly are moral ones. Patrick’s vision of billions in betting revenues relies on the folk wisdom that gambling is too dangerous and corrupting to be left to the free market.
Measures to spread gambling generally involve dressing up regulation as deregulation. A referendum on the ballot in Maryland this fall, championed by Martin O’Malley, the Democratic governor, will ask voters to amend the state Constitution to permit 15,000 slot machines. But, in fact, thanks to a loophole in the “charitable gambling” laws meant to facilitate raffles and bingo, there already are thousands of gambling machines in barrooms across Maryland. Oddly, the state senate is moving ahead on a bill to ban these machines — even as the state prepares the referendum to “legalize” gambling.
Casinos are marketed to voters the same way they are marketed to patrons — by accentuating moments of exhilaration and playing down the way the business is designed to take in more money than it pays out. The image of the gambler that casinos want to convey is of someone wild, free, savvy, like a rogue in a cologne ad or a John Ford movie. He knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em. This image is meant not only to flatter the gambler but also to legitimize the casino. Mister Free Spirit wouldn’t play a rigged game.
There is a catch, though.
How to apply for an MFA
And, I think, the advice is to some degree generalizable to other programs. At any rate, excellent advice here on constructing a good application to an MFA program.
Cedarwood-Amber
After my prep with MR GLO and TOBS Herbal Preshave Gel, I rubbed Honeybee Spa’s Cedarwood Amber shea-butter shave stick over my two-day stubble. Cedarwood Amber is a lovely fragrance, and the lather, created with the aid of the Simpsons Persian Jar 2 Super, was excellent. I used the Edwin Jagger Chatsworth, which held a Zorrik near the end of its effectiveness, so I wasn’t able really to judge whether the preshave gel was working. I did get quite a good shave, with Rituals Skincare shaving oil for the oil pass. And 4711 aftershave made a good finish.
