This is a crosspost with MusicalGod.
May 14 2010
The “most trusted man in America”?
FBI files discuss Cronkite aiding Vietnam protesters
Legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite allegedly collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even pledging CBS News resources to help pull off events, according to FBI documents obtained by Yahoo! News.
The documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, say that in November 1969, Cronkite encouraged students at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., to invite Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie to address a protest they were planning near Cape Kennedy (now known as Cape Canaveral). Cronkite told the group’s leader that Muskie would be nearby for a fundraiser on the day of the protest, and said that “CBS would rent [a] helicopter to take Muskie to and from site of rally,” according to the documents.
more at the link above
May 13 2010
A shocking admission?
Health overhaul law potentially costs $115B more
President Barack Obama’s new health care law could potentially add at least $115 billion more to government health care spending over the next 10 years, congressional budget referees said Tuesday.
If Congress approves all the additional spending called for in the legislation, it would push the ten-year cost of the overhaul above $1 trillion, an unofficial limit the Obama administration set early on.
The Congressional Budget Office said the added spending includes $10 billion to $20 billion in administrative costs to federal agencies carrying out the law, as well as $34 billion for community health centers and $39 billion for Indian health care.
The costs were not reflected in earlier estimates by the budget office, although Republican lawmakers strenuously argued that they should have been.
Say it isn’t so! You mean, a newly minted government program is really going to cost more than they said it would?
I’m shocked and appalled. Mostly appalled.
Appalled that there is anyone, anywhere, who doesn’t think that the program is likely to cost 2 or 3 times as much as estimated, at a minimum… and maybe much more.
Of course, there are people in the world who know nothing of history.
May 12 2010
Welcome to California: Please don’t go home
California came last in a survey ranking the fifty states and Washington D.C. as places to do business, underscoring the weakened competitive position of the state, and the Victor Valley.
The survey, conducted by Chief Executive magazine, asked business leaders to rank states based on taxation and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment.
Despite its favorable climate, California rated lowest in the survey for the second year running, due to high taxes and heavy regulations, high unemployment rate and heavy union presence.
Income tax runs as high as 10 percent for top earners, and many of those tax dollars go to benefits for California’s swelling number of government employees, with $500 billion in unfunded pension and health care liabilities for state workers. And unions are growing – from 16.1 percent of workers in 1998 to 17.8 percent in 2002.
Victorville City Councilman Ryan McEachron said he’s not surprised by the survey results, “but we need to do something to turn it around.”
As a councilman, McEachron is still stinging from seeing the Victor Valley lose over $30 million in redevelopment funds last week to fill state coffers. “That’s money we could have used to help create jobs,” he said.
As president and CEO of ARMAC Insurance, McEachron says he’s losing five to 10 accounts a month as many local companies shut down.
Emblematic of the problem: Top policy analyst for Los Angeles City Council calls for 1,000 more job cuts (much more at the link)
The budget roller coaster at Los Angeles City Hall took another sharp turn on Tuesday, with the City Council’s top policy analyst calling for the elimination of 1,000 jobs on top of the 761 targeted by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in his proposed annual budget.
California is hemorrhaging tax-payers. Non-tax-payers are staying here, trying to collect more services, and public employees are staying here, because they are paid more here, and get better benefits packages, than they would in nearly any other state.
Remember those funny bumper stickers we used to see, when the joke was that “real Californians” didn’t want other people moving here and clogging the place up?
Well, things are different now. Given that productive people are leaving the state in droves, for more business friendly places like Nevada, Texas and Utah, we desperately need people to move here and pay some taxes.
But what people, in their right minds, would come to California these days, unless they were coming from, oh, I don’t know, Kabul or something?
Herewith, my new bumper sticker:
May 11 2010
The Mojave cross has been stolen: UPDATE
A cross at the Mojave National Preserve that has served as a World War I memorial and was the subject of a First Amendment lawsuit that made it to the Supreme Court was reported missing Monday, officials say.
Linda Slater, spokeswoman for the preserve, said the wooden cover over the cross was reported missing Saturday. The uncovered cross was seen again Sunday. But when National Preserve staff went to the site to replace the wooden cover, the cross was gone.
A lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California in 2001 argued that the display of the cross in the memorial violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court in April by a 5-4 ruling decided that the cross could stay.
There is, as yet, no word on who removed the Mojave Cross. Your speculations are as good as mine.
But I have my suspicions.
LATER THOUGHT:
I wonder if the people who are willing to do anything to get that cross removed have any concern whatsoever about the beliefs of the soldiers who gave their lives, or their families? Of course, some proportion of anti-religion fanaticism claims to be pacifist, and blames religion for the violence in the world. But if they are the ones who took this cross, it seems they have no compunctions about theft.
UPDATE: Here’s an update with more details.
May 09 2010
Everything happens, somewhere? The parallel universe theory
Quantum wonders: Nobody understands
It is tempting, faced with the full-frontal assault of quantum weirdness, to trot out the notorious quote from Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman: “Nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
It does have a ring of truth to it, though. The explanations attempted here use the most widely accepted framework for thinking about quantum weirdness, called the Copenhagen interpretation after the city in which Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg thrashed out its ground rules in the early 20th century.
With its uncertainty principles and measurement paradoxes, the Copenhagen interpretation amounts to an admission that, as classical beasts, we are ill-equipped to see underlying quantum reality. Any attempt we make to engage with it reduces it to a shallow classical projection of its full quantum richness.
Lev Vaidman of Tel Aviv University, Israel, like many other physicists, touts an alternative explanation. “I don’t feel that I don’t understand quantum mechanics,” he says. But there is a high price to be paid for that understanding – admitting the existence of parallel universes.
In this picture, wave functions do not “collapse” to classical certainty every time you measure them; reality merely splits into as many parallel worlds as there are measurement possibilities. One of these carries you and the reality you live in away with it. “If you don’t admit many-worlds, there is no way to have a coherent picture,” says Vaidman.
Or, in the words of Feynman again, whether it is the Copenhagen interpretation or many-worlds you accept, “the ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be”.
Being a musician, I have to wonder if this parallel universe thing, with a new universe sprouting up to contain each contingency that “could” have happened but “didn’t” in our universe, means that for every wrong note in a jazz improvisation there is some universe where it’s the right note.
At various times in my life, I think I’ve created a LOT of universes.
May 08 2010
A Shakespearian Leader For Our Time
Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
William Shakespeare
After reading this article I can only wonder which of these attributes of greatness applies to the esteemed junior Senator from the great State of Minnesota. Given the times in which we live, given the magnitude and seriousness of so many national and international issues facing our great nation, it is of great comfort to know Stewart Smalley is on the job!
The people from the land of 10,000 lakes must be so proud.
May 07 2010
The obvious response is….
I’ve commented on the issue of the biggest dangers to young people here. And here is more corroboration for the perspective I gave.
Car Crashes Leading Cause of Teen Deaths in U.S.
Of the more than 16,000 teenagers who die in the United States each year, most are killed in automobile accidents, but murder, suicide, cancer and heart disease also take their toll, a new government report finds.
In fact, among black male teens, homicide is the leading cause of death, said report author Arialdi M. Minino, a statistician at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
“This is a group of people we don’t pay much attention to when we talk about mortality,” Minino said. Teen deaths account for less than 1 percent of all deaths per year in the United States, he noted.
Still, Minino thinks that more needs to be done to cut the number of teenage deaths.
“These are preventable causes of death,” he said. “So, this is a group where we can extend ourselves so kids won’t die, by extending common sense ideas.”
Each year in the United States, an estimated 16,375 children between the ages of 12 and 19 die. Nearly 50 percent die in accidents, with car crashes accounting for more than one-third of all deaths, Minino found.
But among black male teens, murder is the leading cause of death. Moreover, the highest teen death rate is among black males at 94.1 deaths per 100,000 people. “That’s 50 times more than among white males. That’s a very large disparity,” Minino said.
The leading causes of death among teens stayed the same during the period studied, Minino noted. Accidents accounted for 48 percent of deaths; homicide, 13 percent; suicide, 11 percent; cancer, 6 percent; and heart disease, 3 percent.
In addition, from 1999 to 2006, the annual death rate for teens has remained constant, at about 49.5 deaths per 100,000 population, Minino said.
But the risk of dying is not the same for all teenagers. Boys are more likely to die than girls, and older teens are at higher risk of dying than younger teens.
For example, for 12-year-old boys the death rate is 46 percent higher than for girls. At 19, the death rate is three times higher for boys than girls (135.2 deaths and 46.1 deaths per 100,000, respectively), Minino found.
“I wish people would look at these groups with an eye toward intervention,” Minino said. Teenagers are a “relatively neglected group when it comes to public health.”
Another expert sees the human cost of teen deaths and stressed that even though the number of deaths is low, teenage deaths should not be ignored.
“I hope when people read this report they realize how sobering it is and are not falsely lulled by the fact that these adolescent deaths ‘only’ make up 1 percent of total deaths,” said Dr. Karen Sheehan, medical director of the Injury Prevention and Research Center at Children’s Memorial Hospital and medical director of the Injury Free Coalition for Kids in Chicago.
When thinking about deaths of young people, it is important to consider the years of potential life lost, she said.
“Every one of these 16,000 adolescents who died will never get married . . or contribute positively to society,” Sheehan said. “We should be appalled that this many deaths happen to children this age, and we should be ashamed that these deaths occur disproportionately in certain populations.”
Hmm… this last strikes me as a ridiculous comment. Should we be less ashamed if the murder rate among non-black young males was just as high as that for blacks? It isn’t the disproportionality of which we should be ashamed. It is our failure to deal with the cause of the young black male murder rate that shames us. That cause is well known to everyone, namely the fact that most of those killing and being killed did not have married fathers in the home raising them. THAT is the biggest single factor, not race itself.
The government policies that have encouraged the destruction of the black family are also well known, aren’t they?
So much for “promoting the general welfare.”
May 06 2010
Time travel into the future?
Time Travel Is Possible, Says Stephen Hawking
Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking believes humans are capable of time travel — and he’s not afraid to let everyone know.
Claiming he is not as concerned about being labelled crazy as he once was, Hawking has publicly aired his second startling theory in two weeks, after last week claiming it was “entirely reasonable” to assume aliens existed.
Preparing for the debut of his Discovery documentary, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, which screens next week, Hawking said he believed humans could travel millions of years into the future and repopulate their devastated planet.
Hawking said once spaceships were built that could fly faster than the speed of light, a day on board would be equivalent to a year on Earth. That’s because — according to Einstein — as objects accelerate through space, time slows down around them.
Which also means that Hawking’s theory only applies to moving forwards through time.
Moving backwards is impossible, Hawking says, because it “violates a fundamental rule that cause comes before effect.”
If moving backwards through time was possible, a person could shoot their former selves.
“I believe things cannot make themselves impossible,” Hawking said.
However, once spaceships approached the speed of light, their crew would start skipping through Earth years on a daily basis, giving the human race a chance to start again.
“It would take six years at full power just to reach these speeds,” Hawking said. “After the first two years, it would reach half light speed and be far outside the solar system. After another two years, it would be traveling at 90 per cent of the speed of light.”
“After another two years of full thrust, the ship would reach full speed, 98 per cent of the speed of light, and each day on the ship would be a year on Earth. At such speeds, a trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years for those on board.”
Manchester University professor Brian Cox told The Times that Hawking’s theory had already found some basis in experiments carried out by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
“When we accelerate tiny particles to 99.99 per cent of the sped of light in the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva, the time they experience passes at one-seventhousandth of the rate it does for us,” Prof Cox said.
Hawking admits he is obsessed with time travel — he told the Daily Mail if he could go backwards he’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo — but said as he got older, he cared less about what people thought of his theories.
“Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank,” he said in Stephen Hawking’s Universe.
“These days I’m not so cautious.”
We are all time travelers heading into the future, of course, just somewhat more slowly.
I’d love to know what kind of space-drive Hawking has in mind to achieve 98% of the speed of light. Whatever it is, I doubt Al Gore will approve… unless, of course, a galactic warming conference is being held in the Large Magellanic Cloud, in which case he’ll be sure to attend in his private light-speed yacht.
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May 05 2010
Spending more and getting less?
They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools
Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent.
To document the phenomenon, this paper reviews district budgets and state records for the nation’s five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. It reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.
Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.
To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.
Citizens drastically underestimate current per-student spending and are misled by official figures. Taxpayers cannot make informed decisions about public school funding unless they know how much districts currently spend. And with state budgets stretched thin, it is more crucial than ever to carefully allocate every tax dollar
At the link above, the article introduced here is available (scroll down on the page to see it). If you care about how your tax dollars for education are being spent, it’s required reading.
The problem with public education is NOT too little money allocated for it.
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