October 2007 archive

In last Monday’s Washington Post, Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung wrote, “The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.” 

One of the funnier little episodes of the past week has been watching the right decide whether or not they should take this advice; decide whether or not they should declare victory over al Qaeda.

That the US cannot declare victory over al Qaeda is generally agreed.  The reasons vary; Democrats, journalists, and even, tangetially, al Qaeda itself are cited.  Out of this confusion, it takes Dick Cheney to provide the right a real lesson in rhetorical consistency.

A friend from Taos Pueblo invited me out for a drink the other night.  Turns out she had something on her mind.  “I hardly ever ask you to do anything.  You have to write a blog about the Cleveland Indians mascot because of the World series.” It’s a big issue in Indian Country.  And so, I am carrying out my friend’s wishes.

And, as it happens, Vernon Bellecourt, a leader of the American Indian Movement, was buried last week, so this story serves as a memorial to him, too.  The depiction of native peoples by teams like the Kansas City Chiefs, Atlanta Braves, Washington Redskins, and countless college and high school teams around the country is unconscionable.

(I put this in for the music only – and a reminder that no matter who thinks sports mascot protests are too serious and “PC”, there’s always lots of laughter in Indian country):

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

Now that I have your attention–I don’t mean the rules of different blogs.  I mean the rules being set down and enforced by big businesses trying to shut down the posting of clips from their movies or TV shows on free access sites.

I posted a clip from the movie Idiocracy in a comment here about a week ago.  This was a part of the intro to the movie–a really funny part that includes the setup for the movie.  A few days later I went to utube to find the clip again and it was blocked.  I also, at one time, wanted to link to utubes of The Daily Show only to find out that Viacom frowns on that sort of thing.

1. In much of the western United States, ‘The Future Is Drying Up‘. Joe Gertner of The New York Times reports on the West’s lack of water and how drought is becoming the norm. “Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago… Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again.”

   “Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.” Many western water managers were once of the belief that the severe drought years of 1950s marked the worse case fort the Colorado. But recent fir and pine tree ring studies have concluded that the drought in the 1950s “were mild and brief compared with other historical droughts.”

   “An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time… Climatologists seem to agree that global warming means the earth will, on average, get wetter.” A study by Climate scientist Richard Seager predicts “the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations.” But, he cautioned, “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”

   Many water managers have known this for a while. The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.

   Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water. While wind-powered desalination could perhaps meet this challenge — such a plant was recently built outside Perth, Australia — it isn’t clear that coastal residents in, say, California would welcome such projects. Unclear, too, is how dumping the brine that is a by-product of the process back into the ocean would affect ecosystems.

   Over population, dwindling resources to fuel a 20th-century-styled economy combined with the realities of global warming. We have our work cut out for us. The sooner we admit there is a job to do, the sooner we can get busy. We have ideas that may be viable solutions, but getting bogged down in Iraq, the Arctic, the Amazon, or elsewhere trying to hold on to last century is not a smart way to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Sure, the future is scary, but a conservative approach, clinging desperately to a lost past, will only lead to more intense pain and killing in the years to come. We must embrace our future with an open and creative mind. We can do it.

Below the fold are three more stories. First, a couple of stories about oil drilling and prospecting in the Amazonian Rainforest. Second, today’s Guns of Greed with a story about the FIRST ever protest at the gates of Blackwater’s compound in Virginia. And third, a story about Quentin Blake, the wonderful artist who illustrated many children’s books, hired to make an ugly building in London disappear. So, don’t vanish… click the ‘There’s more’ link to reappear below the fold…

Lovin’ Spoonful

What a Day for a Daydream

Clive James once decribed a particular best-selling bodice-ripper as like “a long conversation between two not very bright drunks”.  Howard Kurtz’s blog, in which he promotes his promotional tour for his book Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War (don’t worry, he doesn’t mean Iraq), is like a short conversation between a especially dumb goldfish and a piece of fake seaweed. 

I would much, much rather read Redstate.  I would rather stare at a pile of sand.

At the Harper’s Magazine website, Scott Horton described Kurtz as “one of the dumbest figures in print or on the airwaves”.  After reading Kurtz’s blog, I’m inclined to add “or in an oxygon-rich aptmosphere” to the list.

This must be seen to be believed. 

Whenever folks try to rehabilitate Andrew Sullivan, he is quick to remind us why he is so detestable.

As for the “science” of the Bell Curve, see this:

''The Bell Curve'' inflamed readers when it was published three years ago by arguing that economic and social success in America had become largely a matter of genes, not education, environment or other factors over which society might exert control. The chilling genes-are-destiny thesis, laced with racial overtones, was greeted with furious criticism. But much of the initial criticism was ill informed and driven by ideology.

It could hardly have been otherwise. The book's authors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, did not release their statistical findings — the only important original contributions in the book — for formal review by scholars before publication. Their runaround obstructed response by other social scientists, who needed time to appraise hundreds of pages of statistical analysis. Now, three years later, scholars have caught up, shattering the book's core claims.

. . . [T]he book's evidence is riddled with mistakes. Two stand out.

The first error flows from biased statistics. The book tries to determine whether I.Q. or family background is a better predictor of success. I.Q. is easily measured. But family background is not. The authors' simplistic index incorporates parental income, education and job prestige, but leaves out numerous components of a child's upbringing.

That creates a statistical mirage, or bias, because statistical tests inevitably underestimate the impact of factors that are hard to measure. Mistakes in measuring family background obliterate the ability of statisticians to detect its impact on future success. Thus, as James Heckman of the University of Chicago has convincingly argued, the book's finding that family background is a weak precursor of success reflects its biased methods rather than the workings of American society.

Also compelling is evidence about the second notable error — that the authors' measure of intelligence is by no means immutable, as their thesis requires. Prof. Derek Neal of the University of Chicago and Prof. William Johnson of the University of Virginia have shown that scores on the measurement used by Mr. Herrnstein and Mr. Murray, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, depend on how much schooling individuals have completed. Put simply, the more students study in school, the better they do on the test. So what the authors call immutable intelligence turns out to be what others call skills — indeed, teachable skills.

This mistake turns the message of the book on its head. Instead of its sighing surrender to supposed genetic destiny for poor children, there's a corrected message: Teach them.

Andrew Sullivan remains a shameful figure in our public discourse.