"Copia" is Latin for "abundance," and this blog explores my belief that abundance is all around us. We live in a world of infinite possibilities, and we have the ability to choose our own paths. I write about a wide range of topics, and common themes are politics, civil liberties, health, the environment, and science. Who am I? I'm Torq Anvil...
I feel like I made a "Chait choice" when I bought my Mazda RX-8 in 2006. I had a feeling it would be my last chance to own and drive a sporty car before the price of gas became prohibitively expensive, and the trend is, I think, proving me right.
Obama and his family helped provide food to those in need at a pre-Thanksgiving food bank event in Chicago last Wednesday.
Seeing these pics of the event really made me proud that we elected this man. They all look so natural doing this... and probably because it's the kind of thing that they've always done.
A Southern California online newspaper outsourced the reporting of local news to India:
So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.
He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.
“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”
And the idea seems to be catching on:
But then in October, Dean Singleton, The Associated Press’s chairman and the head of the MediaNews Group — which counts The Pasadena Star-News, The Denver Post and The Detroit News in its stable of 54 daily newspapers — told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of publishing, including possibly having one news desk for all of his papers, “maybe even offshore.”
Noting that most preproduction work for MediaNews’s papers in California is already outsourced to India, cutting costs by 65 percent, Singleton advised, “If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” and said after the speech, “In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”
What are people thinking???
Here's the full piece from Maureen Dowd (written right here in the U.S.).
A FEW YEARS AGO I heard a story on the radio about how a McDonald's in Missouri now had it's drive thru service staffed by a call center in Colorado. My thought at the time was, "How long until those McDonald's workers are taking the orders from India?!
I've discovered Spore, a very cool computer game that spans game genres. (I'm not normally a gamer; this is the first title I've bought since 2002.) I was intrigued by the game because you begin with a single-celled organism and guide its evolution into a creature, and from there through tribal, "civilized," and spacefaring phases. Here's one of my creatures (though hardly the most lethal ;-):
Very addicting. (And yes, I've got my nerd side. :-)
The procedurally-generated music for the game was designed by Brian Eno, an artist famous among other things for his ambient music. The music is generated by the editors depending on which parts (eg: limbs, battle items, hands, feet, etc) are placed on the creature, vehicle or building. For example, something dangerous like a battle spike will give the music more of a ferocious feel, while something peaceful like a herbivore's mouth will give the music a more relaxed feel. Music can also be created by users in the form of a short national anthem for their civilization or empire.
SPEAKING OF ENO, one of my favorite CDs is the Bang on a Can version of his Music for Airports.
Tension grew as the 5 a.m. opening neared. Someone taped up a crude poster: “Blitz Line Starts Here.”
By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.
Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said....
Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.
“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”
Wow. Obama's vote total as a percentage of the U.S. population ranks as the second highest performance ever. Only Reagan ('84) did better. FiveThirtyEight has the details here.
Wednesday night Victor and I stopped by our favorite casino people-watching spot, the Petrossian Bar at Bellagio. I remember thinking about the number of Indian tourists walking by.
So horrible to read about what's been going on there the past 48 hours as well as to contemplate the potential ramifications for stability in the region.
After a hike through Red Rock Canyon and our thanksgiving meal, Victor and I watched Frida. So in the spirit of sharing, here's Le Due Frida, one of Kahlo's painting featured in the movie:
Enjoy your day... and allow yourself some time to really enjoy whatever makes you happy.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
-- Marcel Proust
Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.
In response to criticism that he is departing from his promise to bring change to Washington because several members of his economic team were Beltway insiders, Barack Obama said today that his team would combine experience with fresh thinking and his own vision for change.
"Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," he told reporters at his third press conference in as many days. "It comes from me. That's my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing."
Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Hmm... does it feel like someone who drives with both hands is taking hold of our economic steering wheel?
President-elect Barack Obama announced Wednesday that he is creating a new economic recovery board to provide a "fresh perspective" for his administration.
The board will be headed by Paul Volcker, who served as the chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 through 1987, serving under Presidents Carter and Reagan.
Following his tenure there, he worked in the private sector as an investment banker until 1996. Volcker also headed the investigation into the United Nations' oil-for-food program for Iraq.
"The reality is that sometimes policymaking in Washington can become a little bit too ingrown," Obama said at a news conference in Chicago, Illinois.
"The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking ... This board will provide that perspective to me and my administration, with an infusion of ideas from across the country and from all sectors of our economy," he said.
The new board will advise Obama on how to revive the ailing economy. Obama senior adviser Austan Goolsbee will be the chief economist on the board. The group is expected to exist for two years, but could be extended for longer. The eight to 16 people involved will meet roughly once a month, two transition officials tell CNN.
Obama said he would announce the rest of the board members in the coming weeks.
It is exactly 55 days 0 hours 0 minutes until the Bush era is officially over (yes, I know, he checked out months ago).
Writing for the New Yorker, John Cassidy looks at the financial crisis through the prism of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's actions... (and in some cases, inaction). It's a long but fascinating article that illuminates a lot of what has gone on behind the scenes as the government has struggled to keep our financial system functioning.
The Federal Reserve and the Bush administration announced today that they were injecting an additional $800 billion into the banking system to try to spur consumer lending as well as mortgage financing.
Some stark numbers on the government's efforts to battle the financial crisis so far:
In the last year, the government has assumed about $7.8 trillion in direct and indirect financial obligations. That is equal to about half the size of the nation’s entire economy and far eclipses the $700 billion that Congress authorized for the Treasury’s financial rescue plan.
Those obligations include about $1.4 trillion that has already been committed to loans, capital infusions to banks and the rescues of firms like Bear Stearns and the American International Group, the troubled insurance conglomerate. But they also include additional trillions in government guarantees on mortgages, bank deposits, commercial loans and money market funds.
You never know when it might be the right time to look up
Early one morning twenty-five years ago, I was delivering the Hutchinson News in Kansas. I happened to look toward the southern horizon and saw an amazing green meteor streak across the sky. It looked like it was just a few miles outside of town. And it lasted for a couple of seconds at most.
That night (pre-cell phones :-) I talked to my dad. And by chance, he had looked up at the same moment and seen the meteor as well. It also looked to him like it was pretty close by.
The next morning (no internet :-) we read the newspaper and learned that the meteor had actually entered the atmosphere over Texas, hundreds of miles away.
Someone in Canada was lucky to catch this meteor on video:
New data indicates that ocean waters are becoming acidic ten times faster than climate models have predicted. More CO2 in the atmosphere results in more dissolved CO2 in the ocean, increasing the water's acidity. Among the first to be impacted are shellfish and corals.
A recent survey found that about half of general practicioners were considering cutting back or closing their practices altogether. GPs are paid a lot less than specialists, and with the state of the U.S. healthcare system these days, doctors can spend half their time on paperwork.
With the release of the new movie Milk and the 30th anniversary of Harvey Milk's assasination coming on Thursday, there's a flurry of Milk-related stories out.
An intriguing study out of Norway suggests that many cancers may go away without treatment. One group of women had a single mammogram; another group had regular mammograms over a five year period.
Both groups had similar risk factors, but 22% more of the women in the group who had regularly screening were diagnosed with breast cancer! Mammograms are not believed to be the cause of the cancers.
One intriguing possibility: that it isn't unusual for a tumor to form and begin to grow before the immune system musters its forces and eliminates the cancer.
A possible explanation for a rise in cancer is that we are screening for it more and consequently finding many tumors that would naturally resolve on their own.
The results are controversial but certainly open the door to more research.
The NY Times suggests that Obama's newly named economic team may not necessarily follow the thinking of their mentor, Bob Rubin:
All three advisers — whom Mr. Obama will officially name on Monday and Tuesday — have been followers of the economic formula that came to be called Rubinomics: balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, a combination that was credited with fueling the prosperity of the 1990s.
But times have changed since then. On Wall Street, Mr. Rubin is facing questions about his role as director of Citigroup given the bank’s current woes. And in Washington, he and his acolytes are calling for a new formulation to address the global economic crisis that Mr. Obama will inherit — and rejecting or setting aside, for now, some of their old orthodoxies.
Instead of deregulation, Mr. Obama has sworn to usher in a period of re-regulation, to avoid the freewheeling risks that Citigroup and the rest of the financial industry undertook after Mr. Rubin, with Mr. Summers, helped tear down the regulatory walls between banks, brokerages and insurance companies, and freed them to trade in unregulated and little-understood derivatives worth trillions of dollars. Mr. Geithner spent his first years as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York seeking ways to at least monitor those markets better.
Instead of balancing budgets, the Obama team will be going deeper into debt for at least two years by spending hundreds of billions of dollars more to stimulate the economy, without concern for deficits, for aid to the jobless, states and cities; tax cuts for workers; and job-creating construction of roads, schools and other public works. Nor, given the downturn, is Mr. Obama expected to try to quickly bring in more revenue by repealing the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000.
The more I read about Robert Rubin, the more concerned I am becoming that he has been one of the senior advisers to the Obama campaign. (And now that I think about it, I remember seeing Rubin in a television interview several months ago and feeling a little uneasy about something in his demeanor.)
Obama is rolling out his economic team at noon eastern, and three people he is expected to name--Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Peter Orszag--are all Rubin protégés. (More on his nominations here.)
Rubin came across as part of the problem at Citigroup in the NY Times article I linked to yesterday.
The housing bubble has burst. The financial services industry is a ward of the state. Insurance companies and automakers are tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. Consumer credit is drying up along with consumer confidence. Banks have stopped lending money, and big corporations have started laying workers off. The stock market is at a five-year low. But amid the greatest financial panic since the Great Depression, the market for one asset stubbornly resists correction: the immaculate reputation of Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary and pre-eminent economic wise man of the Democratic Party.
Gail Collins half-seriously suggests that Bush should resign now. Thomas Friedman suggests that Bush should immediately replace Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson with Obama's apparent choice, New York Federal Reserve chief Timothy Geithner. Friedman also writes:
“A great judgment has to be made now as to just how big and bad the situation is,” says Jeffrey Garten, the Yale School of Management professor of international finance. “This is a crucial judgment. Do we think that a couple of hundred billion more and couple of bad quarters will take care of this problem, or do we think that despite everything that we have done so far — despite the $700 billion fund to rescue banks, the lowering of interest rates and the way the Fed has stepped in directly to shore up certain markets — the bottom is nowhere in sight and we are staring at a deep hole that the entire world could fall into?”
If it’s the latter, then we need a huge catalyst of confidence and capital to turn this thing around. Only the new president and his team, synchronizing with the world’s other big economies, can provide it.
“The biggest mistake Obama could make,” added Garten, “is thinking this problem is smaller than it is. On the other hand, there is far less danger in overestimating what will be necessary to solve it.”
All signs so far are that Obama sees the problem as a big one and plans to respond aggressively.
PAUL MCCULLEY AT PIMCO has an interesting, though not easily summarized, article about the nature of banking. Banks, he says, are a hybrid organization: part private, part public. Banks can essentially make more loans than they have deposits, and that leverage underlies our economy. But they can only do so because an external entity--the government--offers some guarantee that the overall system will remain solvent.
Right now we're experiencing the pain brought on by a period of particular excess in the banking industry. And whether we like it or not, a socialization of some of the banks' bad decisions is required.
Today, Citigroup, once the nation’s largest and mightiest financial institution, has been brought to its knees by more than $65 billion in losses, write-downs for troubled assets and charges to account for future losses. More than half of that amount stems from mortgage-related securities created by Mr. Maheras’s team — the same products Mr. Prince was briefed on during that 2007 meeting.
Citigroup’s stock has plummeted to its lowest price in more than a decade, closing Friday at $3.77. At that price the company is worth just $20.5 billion, down from $244 billion two years ago. Waves of layoffs have accompanied that slide, with about 75,000 jobs already gone or set to disappear from a work force that numbered about 375,000 a year ago.
Burdened by the losses and a crisis of confidence, Citigroup’s future is so uncertain that regulators in New York and Washington held a series of emergency meetings late last week to discuss ways to help the bank right itself.
Reading this article about the developing relationship between Hillary and Obama, I had a flashback to one of their one-on-one debates. Near the end, Hillary surprised him--and most of America--when she told him how proud "honored" she was to be sharing a stage him. and she then extended her hand which he gamely shook.
America has a bitter relationship with Iran. The enmity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is deep-seated.
But maybe if Hillary and Obama can come together, there's hope for us all. :-)
Scientific American reports on the ongoing concern about whether cell phone usage may be linked to brain tumors:
Recent research suggests, however, that although short-term exposure is harmless, long-term cell phone use may be a different story. Three studies since 1999 indicate that people who have used cell phones for more than a decade may have as much as three times greater risk of developing brain tumors on the side of the head against which they most often hold their phone—an argument for, at the least, shifting ears regularly or, even better, using an earpiece or the speakerphone feature while chatting.
"For people who've used their cell phones for more than 10 years and who use their phone on the same side as the tumor, it appears there's an association," Lawrie Challis, emeritus physics professor at the University of Nottingham in England and former chairman of the U.K.'s Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research program, told ScientificAmerican.com during a recent interview.
Worldwide, one in 29,000 men and one in 38,000 women on average develop brain tumors each year, with people in industrial nations twice as likely as those in developing countries to be diagnosed with one, according to the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France. If cell phone use does, in fact, triple the odds of getting cancer, these stats would suggest that over 60 years a man's risk of developing a brain tumor from cell phone use increases from 0.206 percent to 0.621 percent, and a woman's from 0.156 percent to 0.468 percent.
More studies are underway. Like most cancers, the ability of a specific environmental factor to cause a tumor will vary significantly from individual. We each come with our own genetic predispositions for cancer, and the ability of people's cells to repair DNA and chromosomal damage varies from person to person as well.
Bill Clinton moved too fast to repeal the ban on gays serving in the military, and we ended up with Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Times have changed, and Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight references a poll from last summer which found 75% of Americans in favor of ending the restriction. There was also a study published in July that found that gays in uniform didn't impact a unit's ability to fight.
Still, Obama seems cautious, and probably with good reason. Some comments from The Daily Dish here.
Surprisingly, they are rather unfazed by the prospect of Obama implementing a universal healthcare system. The fact that the U.K.'s system has far lower costs and higher survival rates for some diseases--like the cancer which the subjects of their article both suffered from--may explain why.
My belief is that addressing our energy future has to be one of Obama's top one or two priorities.
Obama's transition policy team seems to agree. They are sharing information on energy issues and soliciting feedback here.
Here is my submission:
Hello!
I attended the National Clean Energy Summit that Senate Majority Leader Reid helped to put together here in Las Vegas, and I've written about energy issues on my blog. I grew up in farming country, I've been a lifelong environmentalist, and I've been working for an Obama presidency for a year! Yes we can!
I believe that addressing America's energy future is the number one long term issue facing the nation. Without a plan for moving to sustainable sources, our nation will inevitably hit a wall that will reduce our economic well-being and our national security.
The American southwest has been called the Saudi Arabia of solar energy. The BLM has put in place a moratorium on new solar projects in Nevada while a comprehensive environmental impact guidelines are created. As an environmentalist, I understand the need for this framework. But I also know that delaying our transition away from fossil fuels only increases the magnitude of climate change and the corresponding impacts to our farm economy and natural environment.
What will Obama do to ensure that we move as quickly as possible to begin leasing land for the development of large scale solar thermal plants here in Nevada? And what is his strategy for jumpstarting a new energy grid to get clean energy from places like the southwest to the cities where most Americans live?
A second major concern I have--and an area on which I disagree with Obama--is the use of corn ethanol as a gasoline alternative. I believe this poorly thought out decision has led to an increase in food prices, and it has little if any net impact on CO2 emissions. And we must move cautiously on cellulosic ethanol, as some of the proposed feed crops are invasive species. The last thing we need is another kudzu!
Here is a link to a letter I wrote my Congressional representation on the subject of ethanol.
Obama announced today that he is working on a two year stimulus plan with a goal of creating 2.5 million new jobs:
In his weekly address, President-elect Obama announced that he has directed his economic team to formulate an Economic Recovery Plan -- a two-year, nationwide initiative that will strengthen our economy and put millions of Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing our schools, and securing our clean energy future.
The Los Angeles Times has a profile on Stu Rasmussen, the newly elected mayor of Silverton, Oregon. Rasmussen is believed to be the first transgender mayor in the U.S.
The article reminded me of a documentary I saw at the 2002 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Titled Georgie Girl, the film chronicled the life of Georgina Beyer, a transgendered woman who became a member of the New Zealand parliament:
What are the chances that a former prostitute of Maori descent could be elected a Member of the Parliament of New Zealand? Or of any parliament in the world? What if that person were also a transsexual? The odds may seem insurmountable, but such is the exhilarating story of Georgina Beyer as told in "Georgie Girl."
Georgina Beyer, neé George Bertrand, is very likely the first transsexual in the world elected to a national office. Even more astounding is that she was sent to the New Zealand Parliament by a mostly white, rural, conservative constituency that was perfectly aware of her background. It's a circumstance that says something about the disenchantment of New Zealand's voters with politics-as-usual, and a lot about the irrepressible politician whom everyone calls "Georgina."
The evidence continues to pile up that taking vitamin supplements, especially antioxidants, may be counter-productive. Here's a New York Times summary of relevant studies and a link to my brief review of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.
I wouldn't normally post a Sarah Palin video these days but this one is just so damned funny! She was onsite at a turkey farm in an annual pre-Thanksgiving "pardon the turkey" ceremony. Whoops.
Ron Brownstein at National Journal comments on the shrinking Republican coalition:
As George W. Bush's presidency winds down, the Republican Party's greatest problem is that it doesn't appear to be reaching much of anybody who isn't already watching Fox News. Bush leaves behind a party that looks less like a coalition than a clubhouse.
And conservative columnist David Brooks has this to say in the New York Times:
Believe me, I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haute bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.
As I said earlier in the week, I've been pretty happy with Obama's staff and Cabinet selections so far. I can be fiercely partisan, and while I might seem like a liberal in a lot of cases, I actually feel fairly moderate on many issues, especially fiscal ones. So while there may be a few disgruntled Obamaniacs out there, I'm not one of them. :-)
A short note to share with you some important news. Yesterday evening, my colleagues elected me as one of two Democratic Whips from Region 5. As Regional Whip for the 111th Congress, I'll be working closely with Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina to build consensus for the Democratic agenda and pass legislation in the House of Representatives. The Democratic Caucus is divided into 12 regions. Region 5 is comprised of members from Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.
This is good news for Nevada and a testament to the hard work and strength of our campaign together. As a Regional Whip, I'll have the opportunity to work directly with Members of Congress across the Western US - making sure that the unique needs of our communities are addressed.
I've hit the ground running, and I know with your continued help we will strengthen Nevada's voice in Washington, in order to aid our economic recovery and help restore our leadership in the world.
The work ahead is enormous, but together with all of our friends and supporters I know we are ready to meet the challenge.
About ten years ago at Oracle, I hired a young man fresh from Stanford. Greg worked in my group for perhaps a year, and then he moved on to work at DreamWorks. He was a musician and composer, and music (rather than relational database software) was his passion.
My friend Brian is having a birthday today, and he replied to my greeting with a link to Greg's website.
I checked it out and listened to some of the tracks he has there. It was oddly affecting and, I must say, one of the most gratifying experiences I've had related to all my years working in the software industry. I wrote many recommendations for people who went on to get their MBAs, and I know many people who continue to do well in Silicon Valley...
But knowing that someone I used to see at the office every day is now making beautiful music really, really made me smile. And it gives me hope for the power of starting over and following your heart.
Researchers have identified nanotubes between human cells. They may play a role in embryonic development by allowing cells to communicate with each other. The dark side is they may also provide a route for viruses to infect nearby cells while evading the immune system.
And scientists have found a species of bacteria that lives in the human mouth and creates thiol molecules from otherwise odorless sulphur compounds in fruits and vegetables. The thiols are aromatic and probably add to the flavor we perceive when we eat our fruits and veggies or drink wine.
If you are an HRC member, it's time to seriously re-consider your sponsorship of such an inept, cautious cowardly organization that has failed our community.
It's time for a new, grassroots approach to securing our rights. The Obama model.
Here's a transcript of part of Obama's 60 Minutes interview which will air today. In the interview he talks about help for the auto industry and homeowners in danger of defaulting on their mortgages, among other topics.
I just got home from a rally for LGBT equality. While Obama's election was a huge step forward for America, the passage of constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage in Arizona, California, and Florida were a sign that America's other foot is dragging behind.
The passage of proposition 8 in California was particularly heartbreaking as gays and lesbians there had had the right to legally marry since last May.
A grassroots effort to organize rallies across the nation resulted in the LGBT community in 300 cities standing up for their rights today. Las Vegas' effort, like most nationwide, was put together with just a few days notice.
Our rally was organized by The Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Southern Nevada. My friend Randy Reinoso is on the board. After the rally he told me they hoped for a turnout of 300; the actual number was approximately 1500. I lived in San Francisco for 19 years and Portland, Oregon, for four, so I'm used to gay communities that are larger and a bit more active that the one here in Vegas. Today's crowd greatly exceeded my expectations, and driving home I thought about how many people had gathered all across the country today to make a difference for our community.
I came of age as a gay man in the late 80s. It was the era of ACT-UP and Queer Nation. AIDS ravaged our community, and many of those I knew who got sick during the first five or six years that I was out are long since dead.
Compared to the early days of my gay adult life, the last ten years of gay politics have been relatively quiet. We've seemed to focus our energies on just living, having a good time, making money, starting relationships, and starting families. And we've quietly watched state after state pass same-sex marriage bans.
This year, for whatever reason, is different. Times are changing. The crowd was young and old; black and white and latin and Asian; lesbian and gay and bisexual and transgendered and straight; buttoned down and diva'd up. A far wider sample of Las Vegas' largely invisible LGBT population showed up today than experience would have led me to expect.
The rally today was a first step... a mobilization. It wasn't a call to arms; it was a call to love. It was a reminder to talk to our neighbors and friends and co-workers and family members about who we are. It was a community standing up and saying that we aren't going to settle for second class citizenship, and we're going to win recognition of our rights in a loving, peaceful way. Truth and justice are on our side.
Get ready. :-)
I have a couple of short videos. The first is some of Angela Harvey's remarks to the crowd. She was such a powerful speaker I wish that I'd been able to record her whole speech.
And here is a short video of Judge Pro Tem Jennifer Bolton, The Center's Vice President, speaking about the next steps in our campaign for equality. She is introduced by Vivianna, one of their four children. Bolton's wife Vivian and their other children were also at the rally.
HERE ARE SOME PICS, including one of Wanda Sykes who made an unscheduled appearance (and added a little star power... there were a good number of people in the crowd who had their own little starbursts going off when she stepped up to the podium :-).
Something I didn't know: once federal regulations are in place, a president can't simply void them. That requires an act of Congress. There's normally a 60 day period before new regulations become effective.
What this means is that any regulations President Bush approves by November 20th will be effective by January 20th, and an incoming President Obama wouldn't be able to simply rescind Bush's actions.
Looks like Congress may have that power, however, based on a rarely used 1996 law.
Part of my gross income reflects my individual efforts, of course, but part of it reflects the social and political arrangements that make it possible for me to have a paycheck to begin with. That’s the part that’s withheld for taxes.
Ezra Klein summarizes some key points from Jon Cohn's article on GM. And here are pro and con arguments for letting GM file for bankruptcy.
A couple of years ago I posted about a couple of articles that looked at the decisions decades ago that have contributed to GM's sorry state today.
Re-organization is clearly required at GM (and other U.S. auto makers). But I lean toward a non-bankruptcy solution, albeit one that is entirely pragmatic and devoid of romanticism. We need to invest in our automobile industry not because of its past but because our future depends on it.
Genetically-engineered fish and meat... coming soon?
TrueFoodNow has a report on the possibility of genetically engineered fish and meat showing up at your supermarket. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is currently accepting public comment on this subject.
My opposition to genetically-engineered crops and livestock has more to do with a concern for the enviroment than the safety of the food. Monocultures and other human meddling have the potential for reducing the long-term stability of the natural world in general and, more specifically, the food sources we rely on. But for both issues--the environmental impact and the human health implications--we simply don't have a lot of information. And the data we do have largely comes from the very companies that are patenting these organisms and will profit from selling them.
Large government incentives for the development of solar thermal power plants in the Southwest, wind turbines in the central corridor, and advanced geothermal plants in geologically hot spots.
A new, high efficiency power grid for the nation to transport electricity from where renewable sources exist to where the energy is needed.
Assist the auto industry in re-focusing on plug-in hybrid cars.
Initiate a nationwide campaign to conserve energy in buildings (which are responsible for around 40% of our CO2 emissions).
Lead the way internationally to reduce emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases (e.g. nitrogen trifluoride, which has an effect on climate 17,000 times stronger than CO2; a new study has found more of it in the atmostphere than predicted).
I heard Pettifor interviewed yesterday on NPR's Marketplace. You can listen and read the full transcript here. An excerpt:
Pettifor: It is, of course, OK to borrow, but it's not OK to have a global financial system in which there are grave imbalances, where one country will have a big deficit, like the United States and Britain, and other countries, like China will have an enormous surplus. When these get out of synch, they're likely to just implode.
Ryssdal: What was the mechanism, how did it come to be that the United States and the UK and other Western economies had such great debts?
Pettifor: What happened between 1945 and 1971, we lived within a framework called the Bretton Woods framework, which had been constructed by Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, and John Maynard Keynes and others after the war as a way of preventing the crisis of the 1920s and the '30s. It ensured that when a country built up a deficit, it was then required to, if you like, structurally adjust its economy, cut back and restore itself to balance. And this happened until the 1970s when the United States began to get itself into deficit, very largely because of the Viet Nam War and began to run out of gold, because Bretton Woods, of course, was anchored in gold. And President DeGaulle of France, for example, was demanding to be paid for his exports in gold.
And so what happened was the economists came to President Nixon and said, "We have a problem here." And President Nixon said, "Well, why bother to give gold. Why not just offer them dollars and greenbacks." And they said, "Well, if you did that it would break up the Bretton Woods system." There had been some strains in the system, then too. And he said, "Well, let's do that." With the abandonment of gold, the IMF was charged with finding an alternative to gold. And eventually, they came up with the idea of using U.S. Treasury bills. Now, a Treasury bill is an IOU And, today, poor countries, rich countries all over the world keep these IOU's in the vaults of their central banks. But what that also meant was the United States was then able to just issue these IOU's almost without limit and live off that money, that borrowed money.
Ryssdal: And did that give rise, then, to the debt crisis that we're in now?
Pettifor: What it did was it meant that the United States did not have to structurally adjust its economy and restore it to balance. It was acting, if you like, as the world's banker. And then at the same time internally and domestically as an economy, the United States was building up individual household and corporate debt. So it was a sort of double-whammy, really.
I've got all my digits (and various miscellaneous appendages) crossed in the hopes that Mark Begich prevails over U.S. Senator Ted Stevens in their ongoing election battle. Trends are looking good... yet Alaska doesn't expect to finish counting ballots until next week.
Hello, there's only around 650,000 people up there! How long can it take to count the votes???
As part of a nationwide chain of demonstrations for gay and lesbian marriage equality, a rally will be held in Las Vegas this Saturday at 2pm at The Center.
I participated in a candlelight march marking the tenth anniversary of his assassination. It's hard to believe, but this November 27th will be the thirthieth anniversary.
“The reality, and I think both of the authors would agree, is that many of the details of their theory are going to be wrong; and it is, at this point, just a theory,” said Dr. Matthew Belmonte, a neuroscientist at Cornell University. “But the idea is plausible. And it gives researchers a great opportunity for hypothesis generation, which I think can shake up the field in good ways.”
Their idea is, in broad outline, straightforward. Dr. Crespi and Dr. Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’. This, according to the theory, increases a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later on, as well as mood problems like bipolar disorder and depression....
The theory leans heavily on the work of David Haig of Harvard. It was Dr. Haig who argued in the 1990s that pregnancy was in part a biological struggle for resources between the mother and unborn child. On one side, natural selection should favor mothers who limit the nutritional costs of pregnancy and have more offspring; on the other, it should also favor fathers whose offspring maximize the nutrients they receive during gestation, setting up a direct conflict.
I've been listening to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on my way to UNLV this morning. I'd hate to diagram some of his sentences! It's interesting how many public officials can't speak fluently during press conferences.
While I think that Treasury making equity investments in troubled banks is a better use of TARP funds than the original objective of buying mortgage-backed securities, Paulson's justification for the change is that the "facts changed." Yet he never said which facts.
I think the reality is that he didn't know what he was doing the first place.
My preference would be to provide the domestic auto industry with assistance, but the plan must be carefully constructed to ensure that they re-orient themselves toward a path of fuel-efficiency, alternative fuels, and electric vehicles. We can't simply give them money to keep doing what they've been doing.
Ezra Klein wrote a bit today about the idea of offering to assist GM with its healthcare costs in exchange for aid.
Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person who all the sudden realizes that he or she is gay; knows that if their parents find out they will be tossed out of the house, their classmates will taunt the child, and the Anita Bryant's and John Briggs' are doing their part on TV. And that child has several options: staying in the closet, and suicide. And then one day that child might open the paper that says "Homosexual elected in San Francisco" and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight.
Two days after I was elected I got a phone call and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said "Thanks". And you've got to elect gay people, so that thousand upon thousands like that child know that there is hope for a better world; there is hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those who are blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us's: without hope the us's give up. I know that you can't live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.
In the midst of the final meltdown and Congress' passage of the rescue bill, and while America was largely focused on the final weeks of the presidential election, Bush's Treasury Department quietly gave banks a $140 billion windfall:
The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.
But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.
The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.
Reading the Washington Post's article, I was reminded of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. My friend and sociology professor Jane shared the book with me over the summer; it describes the phenomenon of the powerful using disasters--natural or otherwise--to increase their own power and wealth.
Sure enough, the administration's gift to banks is currently the most recent post on Klein's blog!
Keith Olbermann has a question for those who supported Prop. 8
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has a special commentary on the passage of California's proposition 8. Its passage stripped gays and lesbians there of their right to marry.
UNFORTUNATELY, we live in in difficult times. Our economic challenges are daunting. Author Kevin Phillips has been on Bill Moyer's Journal twice in the last month, talking about the economy each time as well as Obama's victory in the second episode. You can check out his insights here and here (video and transcript both available).
A patient who had both leukemia and AIDS now appears to be free of the HIV virus after he received a blood marrow treatment. The critical detail is that his doctors chose a donor who has a specific mutation.
CCR5 is a protein on the surface of our cells; HIV uses it to gain entry into the white blood cells that it attacks. Eventually it kills off enough of these immune cells that the immune system collapses.
Some people have a mutation that causes CCR5 to not be produced. If you inherit this mutation from both parents, your cells will have no CCR5, and such individuals are highly resistant to HIV infection. A significant number of people of European descent (especially Northern European descent) have the mutation.
Since the blood marrow donor had the mutation from both of his parents, the patient's newly constituted immune system was resistant to HIV and may have cleared the virus from his body. It's been undetectable without any antiretroviral treatment for 600 days.
A new drug, Selzentry (maraviroc), is on the market and works by blocking CCR5 on the body's cells, denying HIV entry into those cells. I just wrote a paper for my statistics class about one of the maraviroc trials. The drug looks to be a promising addition to the arsenal of treatments that can hold HIV at bay.
This particular patient's history, however, suggests a more permanent approach. Rather than using a bone marrow transplant, doctors may be able to eliminate HIV from a patient with gene therapy. There's still a long road ahead, but given the difficulty in creating a vaccine, this is a promising discovery.
In case you are wondering what I think (right!), I say give Joe Lieberman the boot! Let him join the Republicans for all I care.
The idea that he should continue to hold a committee chairmanship in a Democratic Senate after his anti-Obama/pro-McCain GOP convention speech is absurd.
Ezra Klein over at the American Prospect also made the argument that Lieberman's committee is charged with government oversight...and I'd say he's done a damn lousy job of that!
GM warns that it may run out of cash next year. I also heard on the radio yesterday that they've suspended development on all new vehicles because of the crunch. Car sales have plummeted.
Remember all the talk about how Obama would be a weak general election candidate? How he couldn't win the big states? How is hopes of expanding the universe of states where a Democrat could compete was naive?
Wrong! Not only did he win all the big states except Texas, he outperformed Kerry in nearly every demographic.
And it appears that he may have one one electoral vote in Nebraska, one of only two states that split their votes by congressional district. That's one for the record books. That Nebraska vote would bring the race to 365 Obama, 173 McCain. Obama's popular vote margin is now 53%-46%.
Senator Gordon Smith appears to have lost his re-election bid
Gordon Smith, the Republican U.S. senator from Oregon, appears to have been defeated by Jeff Merkley, the Democratic challenger.
I'm partisan enough to appreciate the victory and human enough to regret Smith's loss. I lived in Oregon for four years, and I was quite happy to be represented by Senator Smith. He is one of the few Republican politicians that I hold in high esteem.
Thank you for your service to Oregon, Senator. It was very much appreciated.
The ACLU has put together a plan for restoring our civil liberties which have been diminished during these past eight years. They are, of course, making it available to President-elect Obama, but their recommendations are something that we should all pay some attention to.
You may not think your civil liberties have been affected on Bush's watch. But the argument that is often made is that once we start rationalizing limitations of our rights, each following step is that much easier, and we end up in a place where the unthinkable becomes possible.
You don't have to look any farther than California where an entire class of people has been told that their constitutional rights are being taken away from them... by a vote of the people. For the last several months, it's been legal for California gay men and lesbians to marry. But the apparent passage of proposition 8 has put the thousands of same sex couples who married during this period are now in legal limbo and delivered a message of "you aren't equal" to millions of Californians.
I lived in Portland when Oregon voters passed amendment 36; it changed the state constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. I gathered with friends--straight and gay--the weekend after the election, and it was a somber occasion. I personally felt like I had been punched in the gut.
It was one thing to know (or suspect) that many people were opposed to my right to live my life with all the rights that they possessed... it was quite another to have those people then enshrine their belief in the very fabric of the society I lived in.
NEVER take your rights for granted... we live in a time and a place where the majority can still impose their will without mercy. The ACLU works for a society where our rights are truly inalienable.
Sometimes I'm intense, sometimes effervescent. After 16 years in the SF Bay Area, I moved to Portland for four years, and fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. After a couple of years back in SF and a couple more in the clean, beautiful desert air of Nevada (yes, Las Vegas, but just minutes from beautiful Red Rock Canyon), I'm back in Oregon. I grew up in a town of 800, went to Stanford, did the corporate thing at Oracle, became a circuit boy, and now finally think I'm settling down a bit. I like a lot of stimulation and a lot of variety... you might find me camping in the woods, dancing all night, or deep in conversation over coffee or cocktails. I'm a science buff, especially biology and cosmology. I like being a prankster... goofy things amuse me. Travel is great, whether it's my favorite city (NYC) or a tropical island.
>>> WHAT DO I BELIEVE? That life can be absurd and random, and those qualities give it much of its beauty. That we have choice in our lives. That there is no way that things are supposed to be; there's only how they are. That vampires exist. That this, too, shall pass. And don't worry, it only seems kinky at first. ;-)
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