Interesting News from Elsewhere

It’s all quotes this week:

• “Remember when many Democrats were horrified (or at least when they purported to be) at the idea that Bush was merely eavesdropping on American citizens without judicial approval?  Shouldn’t we be at least as concerned about the President’s being able to assassinate Americans without judicial oversight?” – Glenn Greenwald
• “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.” – Arne Duncan
• “The man (along with Glenn Beck and others in the right-wing talk radio circuit) is a jackass and a lout.” – Harold Pollack
• “Pretty much the whole political world has been buzzing about this. But so far, nothing has come of it.” – Elizabeth Benjamin

Apparently, there is some kind of sporting event this weekend that people are all excited about.

Go Saints!

The Implications of Bad Research for Health Policy

No US Government organization (that I know of) openly encouraged discontinuation of MMR vaccinations for children in wake of the study linking it to autism. But what if they had? John McCain bought into the claim. As did Oprah Winfrey and Jenny McCarthy (who somehow became an authority despite basing her claim on seeing her child’s soul leave after he got the vaccine). This idiocy prompted actress Amanda Peet to join the opposing team and become a spokesperson for “Vaccinate Your Baby.”

But celebrities (and even politicians) buy into fake science all the time. So far we have been, for the most part, okay, right? The problem with this vaccine claim is that something called “herd immunity” exists. A lot of diseases have only been eradicated because of vaccinations and would be back, with force, if the community’s immunity falls. Essentially, the way herd immunity works is if a vast majority of people are vaccinated, the remainder will be protected from the disease by default. That is why certain religious groups can be safely excluded from vaccination requirements. They make up such a small portion of the population that our health isn’t compromised by their religion. (Here is the math on that.) However, the plethora of individuals refusing vaccines due to fake science are jeopardizing the rest of us.

Luckily, the UK government’s actions have led to the retraction of these initial claims. Hopefully, the negative image of vaccinations will fade quickly and we can all forget the decade where we almost all died because people didn’t want to get a shot. But what if this hadn’t happened? What if vaccination rates continued to fall? What would have been the right public policy move?

Interesting News from Elsewhere

“Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”
-Studs Terkel

• FAIR’s blog found some unfairness in New York Times coverage of healthcare reconciliation.
• We lost some good people this week (The world will miss JD Salinger and Howard Zinn)
• A Malawi gay couple is being held in jail for, supposedly, their own safety.
• I don’t know if you heard but Wisconsin just got a ton of money for a high speed rail between Madison and Milwaukee.
• From The Atlantic’s Daily Dish (via The Awl). Guess who said this:

“To understand the State of the Union, we must look not only at where we are and where we’re going but where we’ve been. The situation at this time last year was truly ominous. [...] First, we must understand what’s happening at the moment to the economy. Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that’s only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe; they are the inheritance of decades of tax and tax, and spend and spend. [...] The only alternative being offered to this economic program is a return to the policies that gave us a trillion-dollar debt, runaway inflation, runaway interest rates and unemployment.”

Note: I think “Interesting News From Elsewhere” is going to begin with quotes rather than pictures for awhile.

LSSA Minutes 01.27.10

LSSA Minutes, 2009-2010 Board

1/27/10

7:30 pm

Memorial Union

Committee updates:

1. Volunteer:  Committee will be meeting next week.  We have the Haiti change drive in the lounge.  Polar Plunge is Feb 20^th. Might try to do a joint fundraising/charity event.
2. Program Liaison: No report.
3. Fundraising:  We can go any Thursday in the month of February.  Probably will do the 11^th.  Spelling bee will probably be in May.  Pizza sales in March or April.  Try to do another restaurant as well.
4. Social:  Formal is Feb 27^th from 6-9pm at Brocach.  $10/ticket.  Probably have a happy hour on Feb 10^th.
5. Alumni coordinator:  Alumni event next week on Feb 4^th.  Also sent an email to first years about mentors.  The silent auction is happening thanks to Jonny.  We’ll be auctioning off Underground Food Collective dinners.
6. Secretary:  Elections will be coming up soon.  Will work with Scott on setting up a survey for voting rather than email voting.
7. Treasurer:  T-shirt profit is up to $200.  Still in the red $40 on the sweatshirt sale.  Mugs are up $72 and the book sale made $742.  Checks will be in people’s boxes on Friday for the book sale.  Balance of $1265 after blocking off money for food, beverages and transportation for graduation.
8. Graduation coordinators:  Jonny was here to discuss menu options for the graduation.  Planning for 250-300 people.  Ceremony will start at 11am and reception at Goodman start 1pm.  Probably do a couple types of sandwiches, salads with vegetarian options.  Budget for food, drink, and staffing is $1500.  Still working on graduation speakers, either Jeff Greenfield or Dick Leinenkugel.
9. First year rep: No report.
10. Vice President: No report.
11. President: Reported on fundraising and other items.

Open comment

Next meeting:  2/17 and 3/17

Obama and the (money) Pit of Despair

The State of the Union will be given tomorrow during prime time. The date was possibly picked in an effort not to conflict with the premier of the final season of “Lost,” one of the most popular and confusing television shows on right now. The once popular and now confusing President is bowing not only to television programmers, but to conservative interests in an apparent effort to doom the Democratic party in 2010. White House sources have stated that President Obama plans to institute a three year freeze on domestic spending. This move would save an whopping $250 billion over 10 years. Keep in mind the deficit is $1.3 trillion and expected to accumulate about $9 trillion over the next ten years. I’m taking the Robert Reich-ian tack (Why wouldn’t you after this?) of thinking the President’s move is almost certainly the wrong one.

The problem in the United States at this exact moment is jobs. Jobs makes money. Money gets spent. That money creates more jobs. More people make money. More people pay taxes. More taxes help pay off the deficit. Freezing spending isn’t going to do anything meaningful for the deficit and it just another effort by the President to walk down the middle of the road without regard for the future of our country or the future of the Democratic party. It isn’t really clear who this proposal is good for (even Paul Krugman can’t defend it and he’s trying). The President is going to lose us all.

As Naomi Klein put it gloriously a week before this announcement was made:

“But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realise that they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street’s addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?”

Many, including Klein and Reich, are calling for some major changes to our political system. Some independent social movements, embracing the things that really matter to the people of this country, could do nothing but good at a time like this. And if people can get riled up by the ill-treatment of Conan O’Brien (seen by some as an emotional conduit for the distrust and powerlessness that young people are feeling right now), then I’m sure they could get behind a movement promising (finally) some post-Bush era progressive action.

We are at a policy school, folks. Maybe we should be the ones that start taking this action.

Interesting News from Elsewhere

The political action in 2010 thus far has been more interesting than the last half of 2009. This week, we have…

Divergent opinions on the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. One from Ilya Somin and another from Robert Reich.

The President making promises of progressive bank reform à la Paul Volker.

Senator Russ Feingold opposing another term for Ben Bernanke.

China demanding we stop criticizing their internet policy. Looks like Google hit a nerve.

6.4 job seekers for each available job opening.

Madison Magazine is polling for the Best of Madison 2010.  Go vote!

Image from their website.

What I’m Reading…

I’m betting you’ve never wondered why birth control pills generally work in 28-day cycles, nor pondered the difference between choking and panicking. Until I read What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, I admit these topics were not in my conversational repertoire either. After reading all twenty-two chapters, however, I can explain to friends (who don’t care) “What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Crime.”

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestsellers The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, has now compiled articles he wrote for The New Yorker in What the Dog Saw. While some of the articles are more traditional and focus on one issue, others highlight Gladwell’s talent at relating two seemingly unrelated topics (for instance, the hiring of teachers and NFL quarterbacks). It reminded me a bit of Freakonomics at times, especially in the chapter entitled “Why Problems like Homelessness May Be Easier to Solve Than to Manage.”

It’s evident from the articles that Gladwell is an intensely curious man dedicated to explaining whatever happens to pique his interest, even if the topic seems unimportant to most people. The answers to some of his questions turn out to be fairly simple – why Heinz ketchup is so dominant (taste) and why the so-called Dog Whisperer succeeds (body language) – but the details of these answers prove surprisingly interesting. A few of the articles will appeal to La Follette folk in particular, like the aforementioned homelessness article and the article analyzing the utility of the classic job interview.

Gladwell’s flowing prose easily draws you into the realms of hair dye and plagiarism, and leaves you wondering what other connections might exist. What the Dog Saw provided me with several new conversation topics, as well as a sense that I understood the world just a bit better. The title does little to explain the book, but a brief glance at the chapter titles should give you enough reason to pick up it up.

Back to school, back to the Social Sciences building

The new semester gets underway tomorrow, so I wanted to share this link to upcoming computer/software training at the SSCC. The SSCC is a great resource for La Follette students – especially those taking 819. I encourage you to check out their training sessions and online guides as another semester of STATA fun begins.

Interesting News from Elsewhere

In light of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, this week’s “Interesting News From Elsewhere” is going to be a brief, unoriginal commentary on CNN’s coverage of post-quake Port-au-Prince entitled “How Come When It is Black People, Trying to Stay Alive is Suddenly Criminal? aka Kayne West May Have Been Right if by George Bush He Meant CNN.”

The Onion ran a news brief in 2005 addressing this very topic (I told you it was unoriginal) with the headline “White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters.” Meanwhile, The Awl has had continuous, humorous coverage of CNN’s coverage of the looting, including finding this quote under the headline “CNN Just Not Finding Enough Looting in Haiti Yet, But Give It A Day“:

“Friday dawned clear and calm in Haiti’s capital, but there were increasing concerns that the peace may not last. Many residents of Port-Au-Prince have not had food or water since Tuesday’s devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, and worries are growing about what could happen in the next few days if aid does not get in their hands quickly…. Although there is relative calm, there was sporadic looting and violence Thursday afternoon.”

How is it that the words looting and, worse, stealing, which are criminal offenses, are used when there are so many English words better suited for the situation? Foraging (which NPR used this morning), scavenging, appropriating, requisitioning, or taking, for example.

That being said, I hope the likely misleading or wrong reports of Haitian crimes and criminals do not discourage you from making a donation to one of the many groups who are currently working to help the victims in Haiti.

These include:

Doctors Without Borders

American Red Cross

Direct Relief International

Save The Children

And others

What I’m Reading…

In mid December I started collecting a stack of books from Memorial Library, as I optimistically do before most vacations. After perusing the NY Times 10 Best Books of 2009, I checked out “Age of Wonder” by Richard Holmes.  Unlike most of the other books packed into my bag, I actually read this one.

Chronicling the “second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century” through the lives of several prominent scientists, Holmes covers progress in a wide array of scientific disciplines.

One of these scientists is Humphry Davy, who discovered that inhaling laughing gas temporarily removed feeling from parts of the body and was actually quite enjoyable to consume in limited quantities. However, several more decades passed before gases were used as anaesthetics in surgery (before this a surgeon’s ability to keep sawing off that leg while his patient writhed and yelled in pain was just another skill needed for the profession).

Along with Davy Humphry, the book looks at Joseph Bank’s voyage to Tahiti, William Herschel’s improvements to telescopes, the Vitalism debate and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and more.

Easily the most entertaining chapter is the one covering the hot air “Balloonmania” that gripped France and England during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century. Holmes calls the  competition to make the first flight across the English Channel in hot air balloons a type of cold war (“Some considered that there might be an arms race in balloon technology”) and Benjamin Franklin envisioned invading armies crossing the Channel by balloon.

Holmes writes of one early flight by two “aeronauts” across Paris during which neither man could see the other, being separated by the neck of the balloon:

“This produced a kind of black comedy which was to become familiar in later ascents. Pilatre spent much of his time calling to the invisible d’Arlandes to stop admiring the view of Paris and stoke the brazier…When the whole balloon shook with a sudden gust of wind above Les Invalides, d’Arlandes screamed at Pilatre: ‘What are you doing? Stop dancing!’…Many witnesses later said they could hear the two men shouting excitedly to each other as they passed overhead. They assumed they were describing the glories of flight.’’

Holmes goes beyond the history of science and regularly shows how the work of Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Byron drew inspiration from the scientific work being done around them. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein arose in the context of the debate on Vitalism, which asked if there was an “animating power” in nature that separated organic from dead matter.

While I can usually be convinced to read a book on the history of science, the addition of the Romantic poets and the strong biographical approach Holmes took makes this book a very interesting read, and a surprisingly quick one.

I’ll leave you with these recent images from the Hubble Telescope and Wordsworth’s image of flying in a “balloon boat”:

There’s something in a flying Horse,
There’s something in a huge Balloon:
But through the Clouds I’ll never float
Until I have a little Boat
Shaped like the crescent-Moon…

Away we go!- and what care we
For treason, tumults, and for wars?
We are as calm in our Delight
As is the crescent-Moon so bright
Among the scattered Stars.