The Man Without a Plan

www.romneytaxplan.com

It hasn't been easy nailing down exactly what Mitt Romney's positions are on a number of issues.  After re-branding himself as a conservative in order to win an unusually extreme Republican primary, he's tried to reverse course to appeal to mainstream voters, while concealing the appearance of flopping around like a fish on the issues (abortion, for example).  The result is that he sometimes plays hide-the-ball when confronted with simple, direct questions about what he would actually do, if elected.  But occasionally the real Mitt Romney shines through, in spite of his best efforts.

One area where the real Mitt Romney can be reasonably guessed at is tax policy and entitlements.  Here's what Romney said about half of America, at an intimate $50,000-per-plate fundraiser which was secretly recorded:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what … These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. ... [M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

"Those people" Romney doesn't worry about includes people who work hard but earn modest wages, like the waitresses serving Romney while he was insulting them, or the fitness trainers standing by to help him work off the extra calories the next morning.  The 47 percent includes the elderly, the poor and disabled, students, young people working part time, and soldiers serving overseas.  They aren't all permanent members, either:  one-fifth of them are expected to start paying income tax again as the economy recovers.  These moochers are still subject to payroll, local and sales taxes, of course.  Many of them would earn enough to pay federal income tax, too, if not for the Bush and Obama tax cuts.  (Alas, that's an unfortunate side effect of lowering taxes:  it benefits the mop technicians and the job-creators alike.)  And, awkwardly, Mitt Romney himself paid no income tax last year, instead paying the IRS only 14 percent on capital gains of $21 million.  To make sense of Romney's contradictory statements, you have to add a giant asterisk to them:  tax cuts are good *if they benefit the wealthy.  Paying no income tax is irresponsible *unless you are wealthy.

Romney's response to the leaking of this video was a hasty press conference in which he doubled-down on his comments, admitting only that they were "not elegantly stated".  (Is there an elegant way to say, during a sumptuous banquet, that people are not even entitled to food?  Pass the caviar.)  In case that didn't stick, Romney tried to suggest his comments were taken out of context.  (Not so.  The full video has been released.)  When none of these excuses worked, Romney finally decided that what he meant to say about what he meant to say was that his comments were "completely wrong".

But those "completely wrong" remarks are consistent  with his stated policy positions--more consistent than usual for Romney, at least.  Romney's tax plan consists of a few specific guarantees that will benefit the wealthy; mathematically impossible promises about lowering taxes across the board without increasing the deficit; and vague threats to the middle class and poor about eliminating deductions and "loopholes", and "expanding the tax base".  Which deductions would be on the chopping block?  When asked directly if this includes things like the Earned Income tax credit for people with modest wages, the child tax credit, the home mortgage deduction, or deductions for college tuition and student loans, Romney won't say.  Eliminating such "loopholes" would indeed suffice to "expand the tax base" on those free-riding 47 percenters.

Well, most of the 47 percenters, anyway.  We need that asterisk again, since Mitt Romney would give wealthy 47 percenters like himself historic tax cuts.  This is where Romney's tax plan gets specific.  

He will repeal the estate tax, which would benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans who die each year whose estates, like Romney's, will be subject to this tax (it affects inheritances exceeding $5 million).  Under Obama, the estate tax rate was reduced to an historic low (35 percent; it was 45 percent under Bush, and 55 percent under Clinton), but why pay that when you can pay nothing?  Sure, repealing the estate tax would increase the deficit by $29 billion per year, but that can be offset by cutting public programs the wealthy don't need (like Big Bird).  

The other thing Romney will repeal is the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).  The AMT affects 4 percent of taxpayers and is supposed to ensure that wealthy individuals and corporations pay at least some tax.  There goes another $26 billion per year.  Obama's budget will reduce the number of taxpayers affected by the AMT by permanently indexing it for inflation, but that's not enough to benefit ultra-rich guys like Mitt Romney.  

Finally, Romney pledges not to raise taxes on capital gains.  What a relief that will be for so many Americans who, like Romney, made $21 million in capital gains last year while paying less tax than a bus driver as a percentage of income.  By contrast, under Obama the capital gains tax will increase 9 percent (still lower than rates under Reagan) for households with income in the top 2 percent.  Socialism!

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on conflicts of interest in medicine

According to the Houston Chronicle, the University of Texas is allowing a limited waiver to its conflict of interest policy in order to allow the president of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Ronald DePinho, to maintain his financial ties to drug companies.  Dr. DePinho has the largest interests in Karyopharm and Metamark, which he co-founded, and nearly $4.9 million of stock in Aveo, and the Chronicle says these companies are the most likely to propose clinical trials at M. D. Anderson.

I'm scratching my head here.  If this isn't a conflict of interest in medicine, then what is?  Kudos to Sen. Grassley (R-Iowa) for his comments to the Chronicle:

The limited waiver was criticized by U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has investigated conflicts of interest in medicine and championed legislation to make ties more transparent.

In an email Tuesday, Grassley said "the onus" is on the UT System to explain how the "arrangements completely protect patients and the integrity of medical research."

"Even if Dr. DePinho's financial holdings are in a blind trust, the perception of bias by M.D. Anderson researchers toward companies co-owned by the boss could taint their research," Grassley wrote. "And why is it important for the head of M.D. Anderson to have been active in 'commercialization activities?'

"The emphasis on 'commercialization' is potentially inconsistent with the goal of treating patients, so the university should explain further how the public benefits."

Weather on steroids

Bloomberg published an interesting article about Hurricane Sandy and global warming.  Here are some snippets:

Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us -- and they’re right -- that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all.

... Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, offers a baseball analogy: “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

... If all that doesn’t impress, forget the scientists ostensibly devoted to advancing knowledge and saving lives. Listen instead to corporate insurers committed to compiling statistics for profit.

On Oct. 17 the giant German reinsurance company Munich Re issued a prescient report titled Severe Weather in North America. Globally, the rate of extreme weather events is rising, and “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.”

From 1980 through 2011, weather disasters caused losses totaling $1.06 trillion. Munich Re found “a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades.”

Business gets it.  They can't afford not to.

Should human genes be patentable?

The issue came up at a seminar.  My gut reaction was to agree with James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, that patenting human genes is "lunacy".  In June, Watson reiterated his beliefs in an amicus brief filed in a lawsuit against patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer.  A central legal question in this lawsuit is whether human genes are "products of man", which you can patent, or "products of nature", which you can't.

But maybe I'm wrong on this.  At the seminar where the issue came up, a professor contended that the thing being patented is the kit for isolating a particular cancer gene, not the gene itself.  Kits are man-made, commercial products.  Kits help the advancement of science and medicine by making it easy for researchers to isolate a biological agent and start doing further experiments with it, without having to re-invent the proverbial wheel.  

However, according to the ACLU the patents don't claim the kits, but the genes themselves:

"Gene patents – unlike patents on drugs or tests – cannot be “invented around” because they claim DNA itself. While another company can create a new drug to treat the same condition as another patented drug, patents on DNA block access to people’s genetic information. They stop other labs from testing the patented genes – regardless of the testing method that is used or whose sample is tested – and chill research, impeding the progress of science."

So I'm not sure what to think.  Patents don't last forever, so whatever the courts decide, sooner or later all genetic information will end up in the public domain.

What do you think?

Member of House Committee on Science: evolution, embryology, big bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of Hell"

Here is Congressman Paul Broun (R-Ga.), secretly filmed at a church-sponsored event, enlightening the audience with his breathtaking knowledge of all things science.  This guy is a medical doctor, a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and chairs its Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.  Words fail me.

Should conservatives embrace Obamacare?

J.D. Kleinke, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and former health care executive, argues in a New York Times article that Obamacare represents reform in a traditional conservative, free-market mold, not a liberal/socialistic one. 

I have to extend a heartfelt slow-clap to Kleinke for expressing so eloquently what I have been (clumsily) arguing about Obamacare for a long time now.

What say you, conservatives and liberals?

Grad student life in the natural sciences

Here are two laugh-out-loud funny videos on what it's like being a lab rat.  The first video is a parody of the Lady Gaga song "Bad Romance".  Bravo, Zheng lab!

The second video is a parody of of the movie Downfall, in which "Herr Professor has his latest manuscript reviews back, and he's not thrilled with the editorial decision".  Hilarious!

The GOP platform on climate change

Can you guess where the following quotes come from?

"Human economic activity ... has also increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere."  

"As part of a global climate change strategy, [we] support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency ... " 

Why, those quotes are straight from the GOP Party 2008 platform.  Reading these quotes in context you will see what is proposed is a conservative approach to tackling climate change--but what is noteworthy here is that it does at least address climate change.  And can you guess who said the following?

"We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great ... I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears.  I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges. ... A cap-and-trade policy will send a signal that will be heard and welcomed all across the American economy.  And the highest rewards will go to those who make the smartest, safest, most responsible choices. ...  We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them.  Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring." 

I'll give you a hint:  it was a 2008 presidential candidate.  Can you guess now?  No, it wasn't Barack Obama.  No, it wasn't Hillary Clinton, either.  In fact, the speaker in the above quote was John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate.

However, no concern about climate change is found in the GOP 2012 platform, or in Mitt Romney's energy plan.  And I mean literally zero discussion of climate change.  Nada.  Zilch.  Zippo.  As the amount of greenhouse gas in our atmosphere increased in the last four years, the Republican Party's concern about it decreased.  The Washington Post covers this shift towards extreme climate change denial in more detail.  In 2008, the party was at least taking part in some kind of rational debate about how to solve the problem.  But this year, the Washington Post concludes, "not so much".

Are unusually hot summers caused by global warming?

Is it hot in here, or is it just me?  Extreme weather events, such as the blazing summer of 2011 in the Midwestern U.S. and Mexico, used to be a once-in-a-millennium chance occurrence.  But over the past three decades such extremes have occurred more and more frequently, and the public may be starting to notice it.

That's according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The NASA scientists who authored the study summarize their findings:

Should the public be able to recognize that climate is changing, despite the notorious variability of weather and climate from day to day and year to year? We investigate how the probability of unusually warm seasons has changed in recent decades, with emphasis on summer, when changes are likely to have the greatest practical effects. We show that the odds of an unusually warm season have increased markedly over the past three decades. Also the shape of the temperature anomaly distribution, describing the frequency of occurrence of local temperature anomalies, has broadened, making extreme hot summers much more likely.

Now, if you are familiar with a statistical distribution, you know that when the average of something (say, global temperature) increases, so does the frequency of hitherto rare events (say, an extremely hot summer).  But skeptics will be wary of the human tendency to misinterpret a coincidence (say, two closely-spaced shark attacks) as some new trend (stay out of the water, this is The Summer of the Shark!)

Only data can distinguish a genuine trend from an unlikely coincidence.  Show me the data!

An important change is the emergence of a subset of the hot category, extremely hot outliers, defined as anomalies exceeding +3σ. The frequency of these extreme anomalies is about 0.13% in the normal distribution, and thus a typical summer in the base period climate would have only about 0.1–0.2% of the globe covered by such hot extremes. We show that during the past several years the portion of global land area covered by summer temperature anomalies exceeding +3σ has averaged about 10%, an increase by more than an order of magnitude compared to the base period. Recent examples of summer temperature anomalies exceeding +3σ include the heat wave and drought in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico in 2011 ...  

Wait -- is that actual data, or was it simulated on a computer using some fancy climate model?

Our analysis is an empirical approach that avoids use of global climate models, instead using only real world data.

Oh.  Well alright then.

In many ways, from a scientific perspective, the conclusion of this study is a straightforward consequence of the temperature record, and ought to elicit a big "Duh".  However, the value of this study becomes clear when we consider the public understanding of science and the portrayal of climate change in the media.  Contrary to the accusations of some, if the media is indeed biased, it is biased against attributing extreme weather to climate change.  And I'll prove it to you.

Consider how the news media responds, for example, when a a typical number of shark sightings occur during peak beach season.  At the very least, there will be a discussion:  are shark attacks increasing?  If so, why?  How can humans mitigate the risk of an attack?  And this is how the media responds in 2012, over a decade after the embarrassment of 2001.  It was during 2001 that the infamous media circus called "The Summer of the Shark" occurred, although there were in fact 13 fewer shark attacks reported than in the previous year.  It took the events of Sept. 11 to get the media to stop talking about a nonexistent spike in shark attacks.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2011.  Unlike the Summer of the Shark, something real actually happened:  a historic heat wave and drought covering a huge area of the U.S. and Mexico -- not to mention historic floods on the East Coast.  In Texas, the temperature exceeded 100 degrees F for more than a month of consecutive days.  In Houston it was the driest season on record -- and the records go back 100 years.  This wreaked havoc on crops and cost the state over $5 billion, including a record high of $100 million in wildfire damages to homes.  And yet, unlike the Summer of the Shark, the news media was unreasonably hesitant to mention these sensational events could be symptomatic of an underlying trend.

For example, in Houston, a liberal city with a gay mayor, what did the ABC local news say about climate change in its article about the heat wave?  Nothing.  The Houston Chronicle also published an article which said nothing.  What about in Austin, that hipster, college kid city known for its indie music scene?  Austin's Your News Now said nothing.  The San Francisco Chronicle -- not exactly a conservative bastion -- said nothing.  The Huffington Post said nothing.  CNN said nothing.  These are some of the first articles that showed up in a Google search for "2011 drought".  In fact, of the 7 news articles I found on the topic, only one mentions climate change or global warming at all:  a Your Houston News article which quotes one meteorologist who says flatly, "Global warming has little or nothing to do with this".

Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure those news outlets mention in some article, somewhere, that global warming might have something to do with hotter summers (I repeat the scientific response:  "Duh").  But at the very least, there is simply no evidence to support the accusation that the news media is biased in favor of attributing extreme weather to climate change.  

How is it possible that the same sensationalist media responsible for the Summer of the Shark hoopla repeatedly avoided making a connection, or even mentioning the possibility of a connection, between an actual historic event and an actual historical trend?  One possibility is that news media have reflexively adopted an anti-climate change bias in response to loud and incessant accusations of pro-climate change bias.  Basketball coaches are well aware that complaining about bias can actually cause a person to be biased in the opposite direction, which is why coaches "work the refs" from the sidelines.  And that's exactly why scientists at NASA should publish the kind of article cited above:  to reassure the public that no, it's not just you.  It really is getting hot in here.

TSA and X-Ray Scanners

I was trying to answer a biological physics question from a family member about TSA's use of X-ray scanners, when I came across a very interesting article from Scientific American:

One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit. 

... Today, the United States has begun marching millions of airline passengers through the X-ray body scanners, parting ways with countries in Europe and elsewhere that have concluded that such widespread use of even low-level radiation poses an unacceptable health risk. The government is rolling out the X-ray scanners despite having a safer alternative that the Transportation Security Administration says is also highly effective. 

That safer alternative is the millimeter-wave scanner, which uses low-frequency radio waves which do not have enough energy to damage DNA.  Radiation of X-ray frequency can damage DNA and thus, in high enough doses, cause cancer.

I told my concerned family member that as an individual person, the risk that you will get cancer from an X-ray scanner is apparently negligible:  about 1 incidence of cancer per 10 million scans, by one estimate.  The drive to the airport and the flight itself are probably more dangerous, and if you really want to minimize the risk of cancer you can forget about sunbathing on the beach once you arrive at your destination.  But from a public health standpoint, when you have a population of millions of people it becomes likely that a few of them will get cancer each year from X-ray scanners.  Why risk the health of even one traveler unless absolutely necessary?

Who was Gore Vidal?

He died last week at age 86.  I guess it was timely that I blogged about William F. Buckley, as the two were public adversaries as you can see in this clip.  Other than that, I don't know much about Gore Vidal.  Who was he?  Perhaps someone with broader experience than myself can help me out.

Conservapedia vs. Einstein

It's no surprise that a website like Conservapedia provides a megaphone for creationism and climate change denial.  What is remarkable is that this anti-science attitude extends all the way down to the seemingly apolitical laws of physics, namely Einstein's theory of relativity.  Putting aside Conservapedia's handling of the topic -- with its careful cherry-picking of facts, and quoting physicists out of context -- what on earth has relativity got to do with political ideology in the first place?

The conservative magazine The American Spectator entered the fray, too, publishing an article which questions relativity.

Conservapedia styles itself as "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia".  (It has to be trustworthy ... there's Old Glory flying triumphantly right there in the logo.)  Unlike Wikipedia, "We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts" over at Conservapedia.  I think that says more about the website's attitude towards facts than its authors intended.

Selfish genes, nice people

Few things are more fascinating to me than an apparent, but not actual, paradox.  For example:  I acknowledge the scientific fact that life has evolved by a process of ruthless Darwinian selection.  I am also a humanist who believes in principles that transcend narrow self-interest.  Isn't that a contradiction?

These issues are on my mind because I have finally gotten around to reading The Extended Phenotype, which is a follow-up to The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins' celebrated book on modern evolutionary biology.  I highly recommend both.  (But read The Selfish Gene first!)  


A common misconception is that these books advocate social Darwinism, i.e. ruthless aspiration to "survival of the fittest" in our personal and political lives.  In reality, the books merely explain the fact of biological Darwinism, i.e. the mechanism in nature by which all species, including humans, came to be.  


Hence the resolution to the apparent paradox:  the answer to the question "Where do we come from?" has already been written by nature.  The answer to the question "Where do we go from here?" is entirely up to us.  (The two answers are related, actually -- it seems evident that "selfish" evolutionary competition has written a sense of morality and even altruism into our genes, and this is another apparent [but not actual] paradox.  In any case, the two answers are not interdependent in principle.)  Like me, Richard Dawkins is a humanist who marvels at evolution, finds social Darwinism repugnant, and sees no contradiction in this.

What do you think, contradiction or nay?  How do you cope, personally, philosophically, or politically, with the fact that nature is "red in tooth and claw"?  (Vegans need not reply.)

Romney praises Israeli health care system

Mitt Romney praised Israel's health care system on Monday, saying:

When our health care costs are completely out of control. Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? 8 percent. You spend 8 percent of GDP on health care. And you’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our GDP on health care. 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, let me compare that with the size of our military. Our military budget is 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of GDP. We have to find ways, not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to finally manage our health care costs.

So, what sort of health care system does Israel have?  The Washington Post reports:

Israel regulates its health care system aggressively, requiring all residents to carry insurance and capping revenue for various parts of the country’s health care system.

Israel created a national health care system in 1995, largely funded through payroll and general tax revenue. The government provides all citizens with health insurance: They get to pick from one of four competing, nonprofit plans. Those insurance plans have to accept all customers—including people with pre-existing conditions—and provide residents with a broad set of government-mandated benefits.

In short, if Israel's system were proposed in the U.S., the Republican party would label it socialism and throw a hysterical fit.

Who's who in political discourse

A recurring theme in George Orwell's essays and books is his commitment to facing facts head-on, without flinching.  It's appropriate that the kind of sterilizing political language Orwell opposed--exemplified in extreme form in 1984--has come to be called "Orwellian" (a more subtle contemporary example is the phrase "collateral damage").  What Orwell advocated for political discourse is essentially the style of argument used in scientific / scholarly discourse:  use plain language which does not distort the facts in your favor.

The student of Orwell carries with her a toolkit of critical-thinking skills to avoid slipping into Orwellian abuses of language in the service of political ideology.  I'd like to add a tool to this toolkit:  keeping track of who's who.

In the William F. Buckley essay I blogged about a few days ago, there is a colossal Orwellian distortion of who's who.  The phrase "the South" does not mean the people who live in the South.  It actually means the white community in the South.  The black community in the South, however, is arbitrarily excluded from "the South".  This linguistic sleight-of-hand serves the author's ideological purposes, but at the expense of plain language and respecting the demographic facts:  blacks are as much a part of the South as whites.

The same who's who violation occurs in Western newspaper articles about the conflict in Afghanistan.  I have seen the term "Afghan forces" abused to mean the NATO-backed forces of the central Kabul government.  It is sometimes said that a certain number of "Afghans" were killed by insurgents--including such-and-such number of civilians, and such-and-such number of soldiers.  But when Taliban insurgents are killed by government forces, they are never "Afghans" or even "Afghan forces".  They may as well be invaders from Mars as inhabitants of Afghanistan.


Should the who's who tool be added to the critical thinking toolkit?  Or am I making a fuss over nothing?

In China, sometimes brains need washing

“If there are problems with the brain, then it needs to be washed, just like dialysis for kidney patients".  Those words were spoken yesterday by Jiang Yudui, chairman of the China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong.  His comments came ahead of today's protest of tens of thousands in Hong Kong, accusing the government of attempting to brainwash children with the introduction of Chinese national education.  The Financial Times reports:

Course materials made available to schools include a teaching manual describing the Chinese authoritarian government as “progressive, selfless and united” while assessing the US system as one that allows politics to disrupt the lives of ordinary people, and a prescriptive guide on how to be a “good child of China” that directs children to shout out in class: “I am proud to be a Chinese”.

The materials discuss contemporary Chinese history but leave out the June 4, 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square.  A blogger from Singapore provides these translated excerpts from the teaching manual:

“Questions to prompt students to share their experience in singing and hearing the national anthem: When you hear the national anthem, does it bring to mind the Motherland? Does it remind you that you are a Chinese national? . . . Does it not evoke your sense of national pride and move you to tears? . . .
Note: Should the teacher find that the student does not display strong emotions of patriotism/nationalism, do not criticize him. Accept his behavior but ask the student to reflect upon himself.” (emphasis mine)
... [The teaching guides] ask students to reflect on themselves should they fail to display strong patriotic feelings when cheering for the national team etc. "

I can't verify the accuracy of this translation, but it is consistent with what is being paraphrased in Radio Free Asia, Associated Press, Asia Sentinal, and an article at a Hong Kong-based newspaper hilariously called "Class Struggle".

Why the Negro had to Lose

I came across an essay on the life of William F. Buckley, Jr. written by his on-again off-again close friend Garry Wills ("Daredevil" in The Atlantic, 2010).  It is a mostly glowing piece about Buckley's wit, charm, and generosity, but the following passage took me by surprise:

It was not surprising that Bill and I would initially disagree about the civil rights movement.  In a notorious 1957 editorial called "Why the South Must Prevail," he defended segregation because whites were "the advanced race," and "the claims of civilization supersede[d] those of universal suffrage." 

Here's more of what Buckley said in "Why the South Must Prevail" (as qtd. in Philadelphia Tribune; a complete quotation of the article is available here):

The central question that emerges — and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal — is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of white over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the white community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.

Buckley also wrote "On Negro Inferiority", published in National Review on April 8, 1969 -- almost exactly one year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.


Yikes.  Talk about being on the wrong side of history.  

Supreme Court to Rule on Defense of Marriage Act?

The ACLU reported on its website today that the Supreme Court will probably decide the constitutionality of DOMA in the coming term:

"Edie is an 83-year-old lesbian widow who spent 44 years with her partner and then spouse, Thea Spyer.  Over the course of decades, Edie and Thea dealt together with Thea’s multiple sclerosis and the progressive paralysis that it caused, deepening their love and commitment as Thea gradually became a paraplegic.  When Thea died, two short years after they finally married in 2007, Edie learned that she owed the IRS $363,000 in estate taxes on her inheritance from Thea.  When Edie found out that a straight widow wouldn’t have owed a dime, she decided to challenge DOMA in court.  Her case was one of two that prompted the Department of Justice to stop defending the constitutionality of DOMA and instead to acknowledge that it violates the federal constitution.

There are now over 130,000 married same-sex couples in the United States.  DOMA harms each of those couples in a wide variety of ways, since it treats them as unmarried in each of the 1,138 different contexts in which federal statutes determine protections or obligations based on marriage." 

Science, Publishing, and Public Funding

You paid me to do cancer research. Want to see the results? Well, that's extra.

Earlier this year, the Research Works Act (RWA) was abandoned by its sponsors in the House (Darrell Issa, R-CA, and Carolyn B. Maloney, D-NY) due to vocal opposition from scientists, scholars, and taxpayers.  The bill, which was supported by private publishers of scientific literature such as Elsevier, would have made it illegal for federal agencies to make the research funded by said agencies available to the public online, for free.  That would have overturned the policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which makes copies of any research articles it funds freely available to the public on the internet, six months after the article's original date of publication in a scientific journal.  RWA would have forbidden such wide dissemination of scientific knowledge, instead redirecting public funds to pad private-sector profits.

Keep in mind, no one forces publishers to publish NIH-funded articles. They choose to publish NIH-funded articles because the research is outstanding:  if one publisher decides not to be the vehicle by which scientists announce a new discovery, a rival publisher will snatch up the opportunity.   The prestige and indirect revenue derived from publishing high-quality research is enough to motivate publishers; charging the public exorbitant fees to read articles is not necessary to cover publishing costs.  (Ask me how much it costs to make this blog available to you.)  In fact, open-access journals, which make all their articles available online for free, are becoming more common.  

The backlash against the RWA has spurred renewed interest in a fundamental principle:  if the public funded the research, the public owns the research.  A bill introduced by my own representative John Cornyn (R-TX), as well as Joe Lieberman (I-CT), would expand free public access to federally-funded research by requiring all federal agencies to adopt a policy similar to that of the NIH.  If you agree, go sign the petition at WhiteHouse.gov, so we can reach the 25,000 signatures necessary to secure an official response from the administration.  

The individual health insurance mandate

This article from Bloomberg on the individual health insurance mandate is well worth a careful, thorough reading. ("Individual Mandate is Ryan Tax Credit by Other Name", Klein, Mar 28 2012.)

One thing I would add to the article:  a primary argument against the constitutionality of the mandate is that it forces people to enter a "stream of commerce" (health care).  But constitutionally, it is argued, the government can only regulate what people do if they choose to enter the stream of commerce.

The problem with this argument is that, by law, health care providers must provide a certain level of (emergency) care.  This is guaranteed to anyone who needs it, whether or not they can afford to pay.  Functionally, this is a form of "insurance" for everyone, including the uninsured.  Thus, long before the individual mandate, there were laws bringing everyone into the health care "stream of commerce".  The mandate simply carries those laws to their logical and fair conclusion, by requiring people who are receiving services to pay for them.

Therefore, a person who truly doesn't believe the government can force people to buy health insurance ought to be against laws which force the private market to provide it -- including emergency care.  Are any of Obamacare's critics prepared to go that far?

Faulty Connection May Explain Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

The journals Science and Nature have reported that a loose connection may be responsible for the apparent superluminal speed of neutrinos coming from the CERN experiment, a result which was reported earlier this year.  The 60-nanosecond discrepancy  was met with great interest and no small degree of skepticism in the physics world, as it conflicts with Einstein's theory of relativity, which has been confirmed by many experiments over the past century.

The precise cause of the anomalous result is still being investigated ... standard protocol in these situations is to blame one of the undergrads.