Saturday Science: It Moves!

And it seems the earth's north magnetic pole is moving faster than anyone can account for:

(Note that the image is looking straight down at the Arctic.)

Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet’s core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move.

On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones.

The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 — but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now. “The error is increasing all the time,” says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Information.

(Note: That update has been delayed because of the government shut down.)

We tend to forget that the planet we live on is a dynamic entity -- aside from the magnetic poles shifting, the continents are moving, islands are being formed in the oceans from volcanic activity, mountains are rising (and falling), and weather patterns are shifting.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. . . ."

Via Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read

This post, from Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo. This part struck me:

Eli Saslow reports for the Washington Post on the decline of manufacturing in northeast Indiana where the American Dream is proving to be just that. Chris Setser stands to lose his $17/hr production line job at United Technologies Electronic Controls (UTEC) in Huntington. . . .

Setser leaned into the table and banged it once for emphasis. “They’re throwing our work back in our face,” he said. “China is doing better. Even Mexico is doing better. Don’t you want someone to go kick ass?”

Globalization. Financialization. Greed, one of the deadly sins. Nothing a little ass-whupping won't fix.

It occurs to me that people like Setser are, quite deliberately, being pointed in the wrong direction for the ass-whupping. Mexico and China didn't come over here and steal our jobs. The bosses figured they'd make more money by shipping the jobs to sweatshops in China or Mexico -- American workers are just too darned expensive.

The Hairpiece, being of the class that ships jobs overseas (check out where the clothing in his clothing line is made) is blaming all the wrong people. Of course. And people like Setser are buying it.

Here's the story as WaPo. It's worth reading, too.

Nobody's Listening

That's a song title, and I can't remember whose song it is, but it perfectly describes the ruling class -- including those who exist in their little bubble in D.C. -- every time the 99% try to make themselves heard -- if they don't just have us pepper sprayed, or worse.

Via Crooks and Liars, this from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-All of Us):

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.

The long-term deterioration of the middle class, accelerated by the Wall Street crash of 2008, has not been pretty. Today, we have more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth. We have one of the highest childhood poverty rates and we are the only country in the industrialized world which does not guarantee health care for all. We once led the world in terms of the percentage of our people who graduated college, but we are now in 12th place. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is collapsing.

Real unemployment today is not 5.8 percent, it is 11.5 percent if we include those who have given up looking for work or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is 18.6 percent and African-American youth unemployment is 32.6 percent.

Today, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the median male worker earned $783 less last year than he made 41 years ago. The median woman worker made $1,337 less last year than she earned in 2007. Since 1999, the median middle-class family has seen its income go down by almost $5,000 after adjusting for inflation, now earning less than it did 25 years ago.

And, unlike right-wing Randian policy wonks (are you listening, Paul "I've got mine" Ryan?), Sanders actually lays out a plan. Click through to read it -- I suspect that, like me, you're going to find it too commonsensical to need voicing, but then, this is Washington we're dealing with.

I wish Sanders would throw his hat in the ring for 2016 -- might serve to push Hillary to the left.

And check out his website -- it's sort of inspiring.

This Is The Way It's Supposed To Work

According to some. Very good post, if depressing, at Mahablog this morning, based on this article by Joseph Heath at Salon.

The take-away:

The status quo depends on nothing getting fixed, actually. So the status quo will see to it nothing gets fixed. Krugman’s column today says, “Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.” And the system is rigged so they can’t find out.

I very reluctantly have come around to thinking that the system is so broken it cannot be returned to anything resembling functionality. The most likely outcome is that the U.S. will continue to decline economically and politically over the next several years until quality of life is so eroded for enough people that something big and nasty and possibly violent will happen to change everything. We may actually have to become a failed state first, though.

Any student of history has seen this coming for a while. Think back to Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the "military-industrial complex." Guess who's running the government. And our "independent press" is playing along -- the major news outlets are corporations, too.

There is a ray of sunshine, though -- a small one, and it's hard to know how effective it's going to be. From a post by Spocko at Hullabaloo, built around Google severing ties with ALEC:

ALEC and Rush appeal to people's most selfish impulses. They use greed, fear and ignorance to get what they want. They want us to believe that everyone thinks like they do, when in fact it is a self-selected minority that holds these beliefs. They say if you only believe them, you will be among society's winners.

But when we go to the interested third parties and educate them, many of those real winners are disgusted with what they hear. Combining that education with appeals to both personal and stated corporate values systems and you have a solid package to help them decide to walk away.

If you want to convince people within the corporate form to walk away from a right wing media personality or a right wing legislation bill mill, learn who they are, what they say their company is about and ALL the things that they care about.

There are more and more companies that are finding out that being socially conscious is good business. Whether that's enough to offset those who don't give a damn is the big question.

One Million (minus 960,000) Moms vs. Penney's: Coda

Remember the big fuss from One Million (minus 960,000) Moms about JC Penney's selecting Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson? You do remember that Penney's response was on the order of "yeah, whatever," don't you?

It gets better -- Greg Rothman organized a flash mob for an excursion to Penney's. The reaction from Penney's staff is beyond great:

As a sea of people dressed in pink descended the escalator to shop, to "flash our pink dollars," we noticed that all of the JCPenney staff were also wearing pink clothing, and they applauded as we reached their floor. It was a spectacular moment.

The times, they are a'changin'.

(PS -- according to one of the commenters at the link, the Facebook page "1 Million people who support Ellen for JC Penney" has 185,000 members. We've got them outnumbered.

That Sports Thing

I've been noticing a strong trend in major sports figures and organizations against homophobia. It's more apparent in the UK than here -- the pushback seems to be stronger, with rugby clubs being fined for homophobic slurs by their fans, but it's starting to gain momentum here, too.

The Sean Avery episode is pretty instructive. Johnette Howard has a good commentary at ESPN:

It's hard to gauge who did more to advance the cause of legalizing gay marriage in the past week -- New York Rangers forward Sean Avery (the first pro athlete to publicly support New Yorkers for Marriage Equality), or the father-and-son sports agent team of Don and Todd Reynolds, whose swift attacks of Avery's stance caused a remarkable thing to happen. The Reynolds' reactions caused thousands of other people to step forward and out themselves as gay rights supporters, too, in a louder, longer show of support for Avery on Twitter and Facebook, radio and TV, in blogs and newspapers and sports fan message boards than Avery's appearance in a video advertisement for the marriage equality campaign might have generated on its own.

All of which led to a second surprise: Avery's support for gay rights isn't unique in male pro sports at all.

It's an excellent article -- read the whole thing.

And having the kind of mind that makes wide connections, there's another aspect to the whole trend if you back away a bit -- but we're still in the New York marriage context.

As gay rights advocates intensify their campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, the bulk of their money is coming from an unexpected source: a group of conservative financiers and wealthy donors to the Republican Party, most of whom are known for bankrolling right-leaning candidates and causes.

Their behind-the-scenes financial support — about $1 million in donations, delivered in recent weeks to a new coalition of gay rights organizations — could alter the political calculus of Albany lawmakers, especially the Republican state senators in whose hands the fate of gay marriage rests.

Add in the outcry over Paul Clemens taking on the defense of DOMA on behalf of King & Spaulding, and K&S subsequently dropping the case. (Although as it seems now, the reasons that K&S dropped the case had nothing to do with HRC -- it was, at least in part, the strong negative reaction from their own employees. Here's a good summary of the whole thing from Timothy Kincaid.)

The point, I think, is fairly obvious. Look at the trends in public polling over the past few years, and there has been a rapid and significant shift in public opinion about gay civil rights, including marriage, in our favor. The anti-gay Christianists are finding themselves more and more on the margins, which is what's making them so shrill these days. (Except for Peter LaBarbera -- he was always shrill. It's probably the pornography getting him all worked up.) The only ones who don't seem to get it are Republican legislators, at all levels, and the mainstream corporate press.

Bottom line: It's no longer respectable to be anti-gay.

Sea Change

The fact that this piece was written by Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of right-wing causes and candidates since the last Ice Age:

Now the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives -- urged on by conservatives opposed to abortion -- has voted to defund Planned Parenthood.

On this issue, Republicans and conservatives are dead wrong.

Abortions are a minor aspect of Planned Parenthood's mission to provide reproductive health care, education and other services to Americans, regardless of income.

More than 90 percent of its work focuses on preventing unintended pregnancies that almost inevitably lead to unwanted, neglected and abused children.

There's a realignment going on as the teabaggers unleash their full insanity. Look at this comment from Albert Mohler, president the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (via Box Turtle Bulletin):

"I think it's clear that something like same-sex marriage is going to become normalized, legalized and recognized in the culture. It's time for Christians to start thinking about how we're going to deal with that," he said Friday on the Focus on the Family radio program. . . .

Christians also need to start learning how to deal with the shifting culture and even face the fact that they may lose a few from their flock.

"I think we're going to be surprised and heartbroken over how many people are going to capitulate to the spirit of the age," he noted. "We're going to find now that there may not be as many of us as we thought."

Don't expect a major change in the Southern Baptists -- Mohler goes on to say that Christian must still defend marriage, at least in their own community -- and the homophobia is still there:

"It's interesting now that the world is so morally upside down that when we talk about marriage we have to make a distinction between natural marriage – heterosexual marriage – and this new thing that people are calling marriage," Mohler said.

My own reaction is that Mohler -- and the Christianists in general -- have a fairly primitive understanding of morality. Any "morality" that is intimately tied to plumbing doesn't have much going for it, and maybe that's why they're losing ground. What's amazing is that Mohler will actually admit it. But then, his living doesn't depend on gay-bashing.

We're seeing the cracks in the wall.

Lessons in the Obvious (Updated)

An interesting post from David Neiwert, who's always been one of the more clear-eyed commentators on the Internet, about Patty Murray's victory in Washington and what it means:

But there are more important lessons to be drawn from this. The first and most important: Murray won not by running away from progressive Democratic values -- unlike the Blue Dogs and other Democrats who got wiped out Tuesday night by trying to proffer up Republican Lite agendas -- but by avidly embracing them.

She campaigned with President Obama. Moreover, she sturdily defended her work on the health-care reform and Wall Street reform bills (both of which Rossi wanted to overturn).

It's what most of the "professional left" have been saying for a while: if you're going to run as a Democrat, be a Democrat. The Rahm strategy was a failure from the beginning: electing DINOs might give you numbers, but it's not going to give you votes in Congress. And it's not going to give you votes in the next election. If Republican and right-leaning voters (and those who are really, really unhappy with your record to date) have a choice between a faux-Democrat and a real Republican, what do you think they're going to do?

That idea gets a strong second from Alan Grayson, who, sadly, lost to a loon (the biggest disaster of the election, as far as I'm concerned, but then it's Florida -- what did anyone expect?).

Alan Grayson, the defeated Democratic congressman of "die quickly" fame, went on the offensive Thursday, telling reporters that the Democrats' "appeasement" of Republicans cost them the election.

In an appearance on MSNBC and an interview with Salon.com, Grayson argued that the "enthusiasm gap" that prompted millions of liberal voters to stay home Tuesday happened because the Obama administration and congressional Democrats did not fight hard enough for progressive values.

"Our strategy for two years has been appeasement, and look where it got us," Grayson told MSNBC. "I think Democrats want to see a fighting leadership, they want to see a fighting president — somebody who actually accomplishes good things for constituents."

Duh.

(Here's a recommendation for Grayson from Dan Savage. Sounds like a good idea to me.)

Update: And an excellent analysis from Kerry Eleveld at The Advocate:

The turnout and voting patterns were a symptom of the fact that during his first two years in office, President Barack Obama and his White House delivered nothing short of a true progressive’s most fiendish nightmare: He governed from the middle but failed to enlist enough GOP help to tag them with partial responsibility. Then he simultaneously left the substance of his centrist policies to be framed by the right, who naturally painted his initiatives as dangerously liberal and even socialist in nature.

The result of that toxic formula is that progressives didn’t get much of they wanted and yet the population as a whole has been left to believe that America has jumped off the liberal deep end.

The thing is, it's not like all of this is Monday-morning quarterbacking: we all knew this, we've known it for a while, and we've been talking about it. Obama would rather listen to Republicans, for some reason.

Prison Rape

Change.org reports that standards for reducing prison rape are opposed by corrections officials because it's "too expensive." Think about that -- it's too expensive to prevent people under your control from being raped. And consider that the most vulnerable groups are youth and transpeople.

Too expensive.

Sign the petition.

Ah, the Good Old Days

Hilzoy has a wonderful post on this article by Rod Dreher. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I'm not terribly impressed with Dreher's analytic skills, and this time is no exception. There are some huge holes in his reasoning here.

What could that mean for conservatives today? That we should consider what I’ve come to call the “Benedict Option”—that is, pioneering forms of dropping out of a barbaric mainstream culture that has grown hostile to our fundamental values. The case for traditional conservatives to make a strategic retreat to defensible perimeters, so to speak, has become even more appealing since 1999, when Paul Weyrich issued his famous fin de siècle call for conservatives to pull back radically from “a [cultural] collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.”

If you buy Dreher's assumptions -- and there is really no reason you should, and I don't -- this perhaps makes a modicum of sense. The first red flag, of course, is the appeal to "fundamental values." I hear a lot about these things, and no one ever seems willing to tell me exactly what they're talking about. Backtracking a bit:

The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre famously ended his landmark 1982 book After Virtue with a gloomy meditation about the collapse of a common moral sense in the West. He suggested that we were too far gone into nihilism and relativism to save and that those devoted to the traditional virtues should consider hiving off, as Benedict and his followers did in Rome’s final days, to build communities that can withstand the incoming tide of chaos and despond.

"Common moral sense." I wonder when we've ever had such a thing. Of course, Dreher is quoting a Catholic philospher, so I guess we are supposed to figure that the world hasn't changed at all since the Reformation except for now, when it's all coming unglued. And of course, the assertion that we're all sunk in the cesspit of "nihilism and relativism" should be an automatic response by now, except that we're not. Not even most of us. Let me put it this way: I'm not Catholic, nor even Christian, and yet I don't think I'm bereft of morality. In fact, I think I'm a lot more deliberately and consciously moral than an institution that has regularly condoned completely appalling behavior throughout its history.

Dreher goes on to recount a dream involving the poet Constantine Cavafy, whom he professes not to know much about at all, which is probably what leads to one of those blinding ironies that so beset conservative pundits: Cavafy, as anyone who knows anything about the poet's life knows full well, was gay. And quite unapologetically so, at least in his verse.

The nut of this article, for me, and the part that throws into relief the major flaw in these sorts of screeds, is here:

Conservatives have worked so hard over the past few decades to fight for civilized standards against a short checklist of modern barbarisms—abortion, gay marriage, political correctness, and so forth. What we failed to consider was that we had become barbarians ourselves.

With the possible exception of abortion, I fail to see how anything else he lists counts as "barbarism." It seems to be another case of being Humpty Dumpty: "It means what I say it means --until I change my mind."

Trouble is, MacIntyre really is right, and so was Weyrich. From a traditionalist perspective, we truly are living through an astonishing, and astonishingly rapid, cultural collapse, living as free riders on the residual vestiges of Christianity.

There is a tendency on the right (that is to say, among "traditionalists") to view any time of cultural ferment as the final collapse of Western civilization. That is, as far as I can see, a matter of choice: you can take it as ruin, or as a chance at transformation. Traditionalists such as Dreher seem to have, somewhere in the back of their minds, the idea that what they imagine the world to have been like in the past is some sort of Eden, and anything that's happening now is by definition a disaster. Of course, the history they imagine never existed.

Hilzoy's commentary comes from a different direction than this one, but I think we're arguing the same point. In my view, Dreher's "fundamental values" are those of exclusion, privilege, hostility toward the Other, a readiness to condemn, and unquestioning obedience to authority.* Those are qualities you would have been as likely to find among the followers of Atilla the Hun as among the defenders of the Empire. And frankly, for my part, he can keep them. I don't consider myself a barbarian, although I'm starting to consider that he might be.

* By way of comparison, I was raised with what I like to consider real traditional values -- and I think one can consider them true values, not merely a fixation on centuries-old tribal taboos -- that have served me in good stead. They include respect for others, acceptance of their differences, delight in their virtues, independence and self-reliance, generosity in helping others, and grace in accepting their generosity. That's just a start. Frankly, if I and those like me are barbarians, the world is in good hands.

The Problem with Conservatism

Sparked by a couple of posts from AmericaBlog, here and here. I'm not talking about conservatism as a political philosophy so much as a mindset, a world view that looks backward while desperately holding onto a vision of the now that may or may not have something to do with reality. I think it's a structural problem that we can find reflected not only in the radically reactionary "conservatism" that we've suffered under for the past twenty years or more here, but also in the "classical" conservatism espoused by such as Andrew Sullivan. It's the default position of the bourgeoisie: maintain the status quo at all costs, and if you can bring it back to the status quo of the last generation (or, in the case of the Dobson Gang, a status quo that never existed in the real world), so much the better.

This story says a lot, I think:

“Somebody’s got to bring zero emission cars into the market—we think we can do it,” said the CEO in an interview with CNBC. “We have the batteries and we are at the point where in 2010, cars that we will be putting in the U.S. market will be totally attractive to the consumers.”

In the business sector, this conservatism is reinforced by greed (I searched for a synonym, but that's the word that works). I've no objection to a company making a decent profit, I just have sharp differences with many over what actually constitutes "decent" in this case.

The real question is, why is this coming from an overseas manufacturer? With two of the Big Three automakers teetering on total collapse and the third just barely treading water, a lot of fingers have been pointed -- unions, government subsidies to foreign competitors, "the economy" -- but the truth is that they're selling the same cars they've been selling for generations -- the only improvements have more or less been forced on them. They've had ample reason to innovate, but they don't seem to be capable of actually doing it any more. (Maybe it's the fault of marketing people and focus groups, which don't really always tell you what you really need to know.)

I wrote about this sort of thingalmost a year ago here, when I posted this little tidbit:

Whether or not Toyota wanted to continue production, it was unlikely to be able to do so, because the EV-95 battery was no longer available. Chevron had inherited control of the worldwide patent rights for the NiMH EV-95 battery when it merged with Texaco, which had purchased them from General Motors. Chevron's unit won a $30,000,000 settlement from Toyota and Panasonic, and the production line for the large NiMH batteries was closed down and dismantled. Only smaller NiMH batteries, incapable of powering an electric vehicle or plugging in, are currently allowed by Chevron-Texaco.

My comment at the time was: "Gee -- a major oil company got rights to the battery and squelched it. Imagine that." This is a sterling example of the kind of retro thinking that has made a mess of things. Which leads us right back to the second post at AmericaBlog (and actually an issue that's impacted net neutrality and a lot of other things involving telecoms) and this story:

If Internet service providers' current experiments succeed, subscribers may end up paying for high-speed Internet based on how much material they download. Trials with such metered access, rather than the traditional monthly flat fee for unlimited connection time, offer enough bandwidth that they won't affect many consumers — yet.

But as more people use the Internet to watch TV and stream movies, they could bump up against the metered rates' caps, paying expensive over-use fees. Watching a movie may then require paying two fees: one for the movie, another to the cable company.

I've changed phone companies because of that kind of crap. But at least I could -- if the telecoms and the ISPs have their way, you won't be able to.

This is the kind of thinking that's throwing American business onto the ropes -- and the rest of the country along with it: a backward-looking cast of mind coupled with the power to maintain the status quo for as long as possible. The flaw here, of course, is that it only works at home, and we do, indeed, now live in a global village.

Think about that.

More Good News

Hilzoy has a post with a couple of really nice items. First, from WaPo:

"In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

And this may be even better -- from Jack Balkin:

Some of you may have noticed that Marty Lederman has not been blogging recently at Balkinization. The reason is that he has been working on the Department of Justice Transition team. As of today, the commencement of the Obama Administration, he begins work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. (...)

The reason I say that the news about Lederman may be even better -- well, hilzoy sums it up nicely:

One other point about this appointment: at various points during the Presidential campaigns, I recall people arguing that whatever Obama might say about Bush's expansions of executive power, if he became President he would probably find those powers pretty convenient, and would want to hold onto them. In that light, it's worth noting that Marty Lederman is the co-author of a set of two articles (1, 2) that considers, in exhaustive (!) detail, the main conceptual foundation of the argument that the President has the right to set aside laws passed by Congress when conducting a war, and (basically) finds it to be baseless. The other co-author, David Barron, has also been appointed to a position in the Obama administration's Office of Legal Counsel.

In other words: the people who have been appointed to two of the most senior positions in the OLC, which (basically) tells the Executive branch what is legal and what is not, have explicitly and publicly rejected some of the Bush administration's central arguments in support of its expansive view of executive power. It's hard for me to see how they could reverse themselves on that score with a straight face, or why Obama would have appointed them if he had the slightest intention of adopting the Bush administration's views on this topic.

I'm feeling much better, thank you.