Wisconsin Governor Walker's Union Busting

Most of the major media outlets are still reporting the situation in Wisconsin as being about a budget crisis. There is, in fact, no real crisis, just a false one generated by Gov. Scott Walker's rhetoric. Using this shock doctrine tactic, Gov. Walker is trying to achieve a political end by claiming that drastic steps are necessary.

While the Wisconsin SB11 is purportedly about saving the state from deep deficits, the justification goes, in part, along the lines of how public sector employees are overpaid and have unusually good benefits. If this were true, then why aren't the Wall Street financiers and corporate CEO's ditching their private sector gigs and lining up to go to work for the states? The pay differential is a big lie, but one that is believed by enough supporters of the Tea Party conservatives to be a substantial talking point. As noted in The Economist, this argument is absurd when given a little thought. How many folks would say they or someone they know goes to work for the government to rake in the big bucks?

There are real budget problems at the state and federal level -- financially many of them are showing deficits. It's appropriate for elected officials to take a hard look at the programs they have and the revenues they expect and make difficult choices. But revenues are falling for states and that has nothing to do with the pay of public sector employees or their union contracts. The real culprits behind the fiscal problems are the folks that broke the economy and looted the taxpayer for their bailout. Why do people like Gov. Scott Walker and his Koch brothers-financed supporters want to blame the unions and let the financiers off the hook?

The political purpose of Walker's posturing isn't to save the state's budget. His goal is to break the unions and impose his (and his wealthy backers') fiscal policies for the state, and the manufactured budget crisis is just part of a Koch-financed strategy to further widen the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us.

Recommended reading for this issue is Naomi Klein's excellent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...

The 'Internet Kill Switch'?

Egyptian authorities disconnected the entire country from the Internet during the current revolution. This is a clear sign that the worldwide network is seen as an important enabling technology for organizing opposition to corrupt and oppressive governments. Some people are looking at proposals in the United States to create an Internet 'kill switch' in light of the events in Egypt, finding comparisons and suggesting dire consequences. But first, looking a how Egypt's access to the internet got shut off, it's not clear that any magic technology was at work -- just old fashioned authoritarian government action. That prospect, not a technical kill capability, is more foreboding.

Reports suggest that officials in Cairo simply contacted -- by telephone, perhaps -- each of Egypt's major ISPs and ordered them to cut off access. Each of them acquiesced meekly. The limited connectivity remaining is telling: Only Noor Data Networks is still connected. Egypt's stock market connects to the world over Noor. In addition, a majority of traffic to the middle east and Asia passes through Egypt, and that traffic is not blocked.

Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) has filed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (S. 3480) to give the president “emergency measures" for shutting off Internet access, without judicial review. Sen. Lieberman has shown his hand in response to Wikileaks, when he intimidated Amazon into dropping Wikileaks from their cloud servers. Paypal caved and cut off Wikileaks without even being directly asked by any US official.

Experience indicates that neither technological magic nor enabling legislation is needed when a government wants to crack down on dissent by closing off communications.

DADT and Dirty Politics

So, shortly after DADT was repealed, videos surface of some wackiness on the Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise while Capt. Owen Honors was the executive officer, and some people are shocked, just SHOCKED that this kind of thing went on. But news stories all note that senior Navy officers knew about the videos years ago, and put a stop to it at some point. As the New York Times notes, "it remains unclear why it took five years for the videos to surface".

Why leak the videos to The Virginian-Pilot, the source of the story, now? Why would the editor who decided to make it news now?

YIR

This is the time of year when people work on reviewing the previous year and thinking ahead to the next. I've been on the road, though, and haven't given it a lot of thought.

I'm happy with the amount of writing I did, both here, in my paper journal, and other outlets, but I'd like to do more and put more polish on the pieces I put out for public consumption.

I'd like to write more music, and especially more music with lyrics.

Towards the end of the year I decided that President Obama failed to live up not only to the pre-election expectations that generated so much buzz, but even failed to accomplish the minimal change of direction I'd believed he was capable of and likely to accomplish.

I didn't work at all this year. I managed to do a picture-a-day project through June but fizzled out for the rest of the year.

I read a great deal, and spent a lot of my reading time updating and expanding my knowledge and awareness of Islam. With the spike in Islamophobia generated by the teabaggers and conservative GOP politics, I felt it my duty as a citizen to be substantively informed. Even moreso, I felt it was an area of my religious autodidactism that needed attention. Not surprisingly, learning about what Muslims believe and practice shed considerable light on other traditions I already knew something about.

Really my primary goal for this coming year is to be 10% less lazy and inert, about my writing, my photography, and my music.

Holiday Drinkin'

Just a quick note here for the recipe for the new traditional holiday party punch, Cunningham's London Fog:

1/2 gallon vanilla ice cream 2 cups bourbon 2 cups cold coffee
Put all ingredients in a punchbowl, mix halfheartedly, and pour.

If you happen to run out before the party ends, in a pinch you can pour the coffee straight from the coffee maker into the ice cream and bourbon. It helps melt faster, too.

Lots more holiday drinking recipes from The Portland Mercury's article The Drunken Host.

Skygazing

Tonight is the peak for the 2010 Geminids meteor shower. If you have clear skies where you are, look towards the northeast any time overnight. The moon will set around midnight, and if you happen to be up before dawn tomorrow, you'll have even better viewing with a darker sky, but you'll want to look more westward.

Intelligent Life On Earth?

On Monday a NASA press release promised a news conference to talk about "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life". The wording of the release made a lot of news outlets run stories speculating about actually finding life on another planet. Officially, the news was supposed to be embargoed until the 11 a.m. PST Thursday press conference, but The Sun, in the UK, broke the embargo early on Wednesday with a story titled NASA researchers find life in poisonous arsenic lake in USA. This lake is Mono Lake, in California, near Yosemite National Park, and the finding about arsenate-reducing bacteria is what the press conference is supposed to be about.

Hooray for overhyping. NASA used to do really cool stuff that was naturally exciting, even to laypeople. Now they are involved in what the masses thing of as boring. Although very important basic research, the PR folks feel the need to hype it up to get the Idiocracy excited. It helps keep the funding and grants flowing, at least. Even sober and conservative news outlets like The Times of London just want to get to the "good stuff" -- is there life on other planets?

I don't personally think this this kind of work is boring, but public interest in science is falling. I really don't support over-dramatizing things to get interest from the Idiocracy, because such interest has a limited attention span and only reinforces the dysfunctional relationship between the media, the public, and researchers.

If journalists were educated the way ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman was, we'd have meaningful communications of science concepts to the public, but because the standards are so much lower now, every story has the gee-whiz angle hyped, often with egregious errors in fact. This sort of dynamic does nothing to educate laypeople, and for the NASA PR office to play into it serves to bury stories of real advancements among junk like the whole "missile launch" video business.

The punch line? This isn't even really new stuff. This August 2008 article from Chemistry World titled Arsenic-loving bacteria rewrite photosynthesis rules, says pretty much what the Sun article said, although more technically.  Maybe the findings to be announced have some important but technical detail that the mainstream non-scientific press hasn't picked up on, but NASA's PR machine is still in error for pushing the ET angle so prominently.