NEON GODS

A camera that can image one trillion frames per second.

This camera is so fast it can photograph the movement of a beam of light!  I'm linking to the Balloon Juice post about it because Levenson's commentary is good.

What struck me about this project from MIT is that no one involved seems to have a typical American name.  The two project leaders on the video have obvious accents.  This is of little interest or consequence, but 50 years ago that wouldn't have been the case. 

50 years ago most leading edge technology was (white) American-led, with maybe some Europeans involved.  Having grown up in the era, most Americans assumed whites were the most intelligent people in the world and were destined to always be the ones leading the way on all major new discoveries.  Now we realize with delight that the rest of the world is pretty damn smart too.  However, I suspect many older whites may find this threatening, especially those who believe their white skin alone makes them superior to the vast majority of the world that has darker skin.

--Trakker

The stunning loss of manufacturing jobs

Karl Smith has a great post on Ezra Klein's WaPost blog about the stunning loss of manufacturing jobs since 2000.  Smith blames it on globalization, which is just a nice word for shipping American jobs overseas.  This is just another sickening example of how Washington policies benefited the corporations at the expense of the workers. 

We have allowed the loss of almost 6 million manufacturing jobs in the past 10 years, and there are now only about 12 million left.  We no longer make most of the things we consume now, and how can this be good?  We consider "protectionism" a dirty word, but if we were ever attacked and had our shipping cut off, we'd be screwed. 

--Trakker

The corporations want less regulation. I want more.

We need to watch this:

House Republicans are scrutinizing a wide array of existing and proposed Obama administration regulations in areas as diverse as the environment and Wall Street, and they are taking guidance from industry groups that say the rules threaten jobs.  ...

In many cases, businesses are seizing the opportunity to reopen regulatory debates that they previously lost. In his new role as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa will begin a series of hearings Thursday, an effort aimed at fulfilling the new GOP House majority's goal of making federal regulations friendlier to business.

The Post reviewed more than 200 letters and reports that businesses sent to Issa targeting regulations across the federal government. The rules under scrutiny include familiar issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, health-care reform and the landmark Wall Street overhaul.

There are undoubtedly regulations that are outdated or poorly crafted and need modification or even jettisoned, I suspect most of the whining from industries are about regulations that impact profits, and they're trying to insist that they also kill jobs. 

Companies exist to make money, not protect their workers or our environment.  Regulations exist to protect people and society from company's natural inclination to do whatever increases the bottom line, regardless of who is harmed.  I'm worried that the Obama administration will cave on many of these demands.  We have a government that really doesn't give a damn about people.  Can anyone recall a similar call to the people to ask us what kind of regulations we need to protect us or our environment?  Don't hold your breath!

--Trakker™

Dreams only last until you wake up

Okay, I'm an political addict. After returning from my hike I just happened to read Gail Collins' column in the NYTimes.  Collins is becoming one of my favorite columnists.  Like Rachel Maddow she disguises her intellect with humor, and while chuckling you suddenly realize they are cleverly exposing the ugliness on the right.

Americans have always raised their children to believe in the power of the dream. This is probably why hundreds of thousands of young people are certain they are destined to become the American Idol. Or Next Top Model. Or marry a Jonas Brother.

A few of these dreamers grew up to run oil companies. They believed with all the power of their fierce, tiny hearts that they could drill farther and farther down into the ocean without ever having a really big accident. We learned that from the oil C.E.O.’s who trotted over to the Capitol recently and testified that their plan for handling a huge deep-water spill is not to have a huge deep-water spill.

It only gets better.  Read Collins' column, chuckle...and then you will slap your forehead because none of this is funny.

-Trakker

The right's solution to hungry kids? Find a dumpster!

Sadly this is becoming the face of America: a fat, incredibly wealthy, serially divorced, former drug abuser, of moderate intelligence telling his radio audience that if kids get hungry this summer (because school is out and that means no free or reduced lunches for the poor) they can always push the homeless out of the way and dumpster dive.  This man makes me want to puke!  Can you believe some poor woman just married this jerk?!

America once prided itself as being a compassionate nation who cared for those less fortunate, but today's right has nothing but contempt for starving kids.  They don't give a damn about the unemployed, assuming they just aren't trying hard enough enough to find a job.  They have morphed into miserable, miserly, selfish, xenophobic assholes who abhor the thought that the government might use a few pennies of their tax dollars to give a brown-skinned kid stuck in the inner city a "handout."  Oh, and yes, most of these miserable wretches claim to be Jesus-worshiping Christians.

I try hard not to pay too much attention to politics these days because the tea-party right is splashing into the muck of true insanity, apologizing to BP for asking them to help those "little people" whose lives they've destroyed, threatening "second-amendment solutions" to elected politicians they don't agree with, demanding the elimination of the IRS, social security, and Medicare (just for starters).  I fear the only way this country will regain it's former compassion and common sense is for the tea partiers to actually seize control and start whacking away at their despised government.  They don't have a clue how this county became great or just what services the government provides in return for their tax dollars.  They are zombies whose only goal is to cut government, cut government, cut government...

After being screwed by huge corporations like BP, Enron, the Wall Street financial giants, Toyota, and those who set up dummy headquarters offshore to avoid paying taxes to our country - which is running huge deficits - who do they hate? The government!  Who do they trust?  The very same free-market, unregulated, corporate system that has prover so disastrous!  It's like trusting tobacco companies to protect us from lung cancer.

Okay, the sun is out, there is a nice breeze blowing, and the trails are calling.  Time for a quiet walk in the woods.  

--Trakker

When your decisions come back and bite you.

It's hard to watch the live feed of the oil gushing out of that ruptured pipe and the footage of the oily goo washing into and onto the Louisiana wetlands and not feel sorrow for the people affected, and anger that our government, in the form of MMS, let us down.  Even if you live a thousand miles from the Gulf coast you know this is having a devastating impact on my of those who live along the coast and whose livelihoods depend on the Gulf waters.

On the other hand, I gotta’ say, the South has traditionally been the biggest supporters of the Reagan/Bush worship of the private sector and disdain for government, federal regulations, environmental protections, etc.

This horrendous spill is a direct result of the Republican’s faith in allowing the private sector to do whatever it wants in its pursuit of profits, unhindered by any meaningful government oversight or regulation. I suspect MMS became a rubber stamp for the oil companies at the direction of the Bush/Cheney administration.

The South has been the biggest enabler of this pro-business/anti-government/anti-regulation attitude, and someone, someday has got to get up and make the case that actions have consequences.

It's not fun to watch people suffer, even if they shoulder some of the blame for what happened.  I just hope BP can plug up the well and we can find quick, efficient, effective ways to clean the Gulf waters and the wetlands.  But we can't afford these huge disasters (Katrina, Wall Street, Gulf Oil Spill) that could have been prevented if not for the deluded ramblings of a movie actor/President, ramblings which the Republicans turned into a holy book and has used to wreck our country.  Enough Dammit.

Update: Mitchell Bard makes a similar point here.

--Trakker the Grumpy

The "Can't Do" Nation?

I don't know about you but this whole BP oil spill disaster is really pissing me off, and the more I think about it and the circumstances that led up to it, the angrier I get.

First we had Cheney letting the oil companies write the energy legislation for the Bush administration.  Then we had the federal government's Minerals Management Service accepting gifts from and partying with (including sex) the very oil companies they were supposed to be overseeing.  In effect, they let the oil companies police themselves. As a federal employee for over 30 years this makes me want to castrate and jail every one of the miscreants for a minimum of 20 years with no parole.  We depended on them to protect us and our earth from these voracious oil companies, and they betrayed our trust.  I have no use for scum like that.

Then there are the frickin' oil companies who lied on their applications, flagged their submersible oil drilling vessels in the Marshall Islands to avoid strict environmental controls, and then made a bad decision based on greed which caused an explosion that killed 11 of their employees blew a hole in the earth that is spewing around 80,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every freaking hour of every freaking day since April 20.  Oil is gushing out of the ground and into the Gulf even as you read this!  And we don't know how to stop it.

But that shouldn't surprise us because we can't stop anything anymore. Global warming, the wars in Iraq ad Afghanistan, the deficit from rising, unemployment, illegal immigration, drugs, poverty, Guantanamo, outsourcing of our jobs, the deterioration of schools in the inner cities...Nothing.  We have a whole political party whose only goal is to insure nothing good happens while Barack Obama is president, we have a whole sub-population of Americans who fervently believe Ronald Reagan's bromide that government isn't the solution, it is the problem.  They believe that government is evil and liberals are their enemy. 

I saw the following on the Daily Dish and it struck a nerve.  It was written by an anonymous reader of Andrew's blog so I can't give proper credit.  Please note the last paragraph:

[Andrew] wrote, “If we cannot stop this [massive oil spill], what else can we not stop?” Exactly my own response these last few days. Honestly, I have not reacted to anything with this much impotent despair since 9/11. Not even Abu Ghraib and our collective, in effect, non-reaction to it made me feel more negative about the likely course of our society in the remaining decades of my lifetime.

I don’t participate in the apotheosis some baby boomers indulge of the so-called Greatest Generation. But the thought keeps coming to mind that if today’s American society were faced with situations as complex and terrible as the first half of the 20th century, we’d probably be living with a Nazi Europe and the aftermath of having preemptively nuked the Soviet Union.

Collectively we have lost any ability to make a hard decision, to accept that every action has consequences (as does every refused call to action) and to actually sacrifice, individually and collectively, to keep a terrible situation from becoming more terrible. If we can’t drill anywhere on the planet in pursuit of unlimited oil without destroying entire regional ecologies…well, then hey I guess we’re just screwed. If we can’t just invade the next country on our shit list and stop global Islamic terrorism…well then WTF are we supposed to do? If it turns out that the “wealth” we thought our households possessed was just a temporary accounting fiction…well that doesn’t mean we should have to quit spending money like it’s 2004.

The coup de grace for me personally? That would have to be this. If Barack Obama can not directly and cleanly end torture and rendition and the indefinite detention of the thousands of randomly rounded up non-terrorist, non-combatants abused by the administration he was elected to replace…then there is truly nothing to be done about anything. [emphasis mine]

But, you know what? No one in a position to actually do something about this really gives much of a damn.  Our politicians in Washington are living well, good salaries, nice perks, their families are all covered by great health care programs.  The CEOs are also doing well. Their children are going to the best schools and are not in any danger of being sent to the Middle East to fight our wars.  Our sports figures are also enjoying the good life, unlike the players during WWII and Korea.  Yup, life is still very good for the Americans who count.  No need to rush around in a panic...

--Trakker

The Growing Culture of... Stupid

We're all aware of the large and increasing income disparity in our country, but I think there is another disparity that is widening, and it's completely voluntary.  The knowledge disparity. 

The Internet, search engines, and sites like Wikipedia are making it possible for people who love and seek knowledge and the facts needed to make an informed decision to find it no matter where they live.  That wasn't the case when I was growing up in a small town in Indiana.  That's why I left.

Thus, we have more people going to college and a growing number of people who are aware of reality in the world and actively seek to constantly learn more about this world.  Meanwhile, it seems like there is a backlash against this increased knowledge and the people who re aware of the truth and expect government to act based on this knowledge.

It struck me the other day that what we are seeing today is not just a divide between the left and right, we're seeing a split between the people who recognize, embrace, and seek reality - facts if you will - and those who appear capable of believing just about anything, especially if that is what they want to believe.  You can find the latter on the left and the right, but it appears that they currently dominate the right.

Take global warming.  Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the earth is warming at an alarming rate, and that all of the evidence points to man as the main culprit.  In addition, everything we know about the effects of this global warming points to future disaster if we don't get it under control. 

This is what those who are best qualified to know have concluded.  I am not qualified to double check their data and studies, therefore I am not qualified to call them liars.  I do understand enough about how the scientific method works and have a lot of confidence in that method to eventually discover the truth, so I'm reasonably certain we're facing a crisis.

I am not alone.  This is how most truth seekers feel, which is probably why we react with such passionate outrage when we hear a Senator Inhofe call global warming one of the greatest hoaxes of all time, or read Sarah Palin's claim - on the pages of the Washington Post no less! - that the stolen climate emails prove the data used to support man's involvement in global warming was fudged to give the results they wanted.

The problem is, most those who believe the Inhofes and Palins are either incapable of or unwilling to have their minds changed by facts.  They are immune to facts.  What startles me is how much credibility the mainstream press, the mainstream conservative journals and conservative think tanks give these people.  Why? Mainly because there are large numbers of them and they are so easy to manipulate.  That equals power.  While the left struggles to build enough unity to be a viable political force, the right plays the Palinites like a fiddle.

We are now seeing an entire culture developing of dumb, uneducated people who believe they are as smart, and often smarter than highly trained people employing the scientific method to reach unbiased conclusions, conclusions that are sometimes at odds with what people would like to believe.  And instead of having their ignorance exposed, they are praised for their "wisdom" and common sense, and even encouraged to ridicule science and facts.

This is not good for our country.  When one of our two political parties encourages its supporters to reject reality and believe "facts" that are just made up, we've got a big problem.  Yet, they are united while the left, the Democrats, the truth seekers are fragmented and even demoralized by what we're seeing.  How can we fight back?  How can we reassert a love of knowledge and desire to base decisions on facts, not myths?

--Trakker

An embarrassing Op-Ed in the Washington Post

One of my pleasures in life is to go out to breakfast and read the paper over coffee.  The paper is usually the Washington Post because it is my local paper and it contains the local news and reports on the local sports teams (guess who the No. 1 team is in the NHL?).  Unfortunately I can rarely avoid reading the editorial pages, which can be greater hazard to my health than the egg sandwich I usually order.

This morning the lead op-ed was written by none other than Sarah Palin.  Yes, THAT Sarah Palin.  This may have reached a new low for the WaPost.

Just how embarrassing was this op-ed?  I can see why a lot of Palin's supporters might think this is a great piece because judging by what I read in the comments section few of them understand the scientific method, but the Post's editors are supposed to be educated, and more importantly, committed to educating their readers and illuminating issues that affect our lives.  This piece is garbage and it adds NOTHING to the issue of global warming. It could have just as easily been a piece denying the holocaust.

I suspect if anyone stole emails from a conservative think tank we lefties could find dozens of emails we could take out of context and embarrass the crap out of their researchers (note to self).  Would that prove anything? No. But it sure would be fun to see them squirm and try to explain themselves.

Palin writes, "The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse."  This is the basis of her entire piece and yet the only proof she offers is the stolen private emails that no one, I repeat no one, has shown that they prove the science behind the Copenhagen summit is flawed (Wikipedia has a good entry about the stolen emails here).

Palins also writes, "I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics."  If that's true, then she would have waited until these emails were studied and their impact on the conclusions that man is affecting climate change were determined.  But instead she decided it is better to use them now for political gain.  Talk about sleazy!

To the Post editors: have you no shame?

--Trakker

The Right: better to die than to let a Democrat prevail

I'm really getting sick of the global warming deniers like Senator Inhofe and George F. Will.  Even though the vast majority of climatologists who study global climate change agree global warming is happening, and that man is the cause of the vast majority of this change, most on the right are going ape-shit over it.

Look, scientists have been wrong before, and few predictions can be made with 100% confidence.  Scientists are the first to admit that.  But what would you do if a lot of medical studies found that people who eat parsley have high rates of stomach cancer?  Would you avoid parsley?  I would.

Let's say you live in a beautiful town in a deep valley carved by a river. 10 miles upstream is an earthen dam built 60 years ago by the power company but has since been abandoned and unmaintained.  Above the dam is a square mile of water.

Some people in town worry about the dam's integrity because over the years leaks have developed at the bottom, so your town hires 50 engineers to inspect the dam and report back.

Six month later the engineers submit their report. All 50 agree that the dam is very unstable and dangerous. A major rainstorm could cause it to burst, wiping out the town.

Fixing the dam would cost your town a LOT of money, raising taxes significantly.

When asked if there was a chance that the dam would hold for 50 more years, the engineers look at each other and say, "Well, yes, there's always a chance it would never burst, but..."

That last comment is all that conservatives need to convince the townspeople that the engineers are trying to stampede the town into making expensive repairs to the dam that aren't really needed.  Of course, when the dam bursts...

Something very similar happened in 1889. It was the Johnstown Flood and a town of 30,000 was nearly wiped off the map.  Over 2,200 died. They were warned but never heeded the warnings.

Here's the bottom line:  if the the scientists are right and we heed their warnings and spend billions of dollars cutting CO2 emissions and avert major global warming, we've dodged a big bullet.  But lets say we're wrong and we spend billions of dollars cutting CO2 emissions and we find it was a false alarm, we've still cleaned the atmosphere of carbon-dioxide and other noxious gasses and everyone will at least be healthier.  But if the scientists are right and we do nothing, well, we've all heard the predictions.

What really irks me is that many on the right oppose doing anything about global warming because Al Gore, a liberal Democrat, is sounding the alarm.  The right has become so reactionary against liberals that they automatically attack anything any of us support.

Look no further than health care reform. A year ago everyone was aghast at the 40 million Americans without health care and the 40,000+ who die each year because they don't have it, and we wanted to fix the system.  Now, because Barak Obama is leading the fight to reform the system, the right wants to kill the bill.  Kill it.  No reform.  Screw all those poor Americans who are suffering, Democrats (AKA socialists, liberals, communists) must never be allowed to fix anything.  Better to let people suffer and die.

--Trakker