Putting the foxes in charge

Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor, the guy we’re all going to have to rely on to pull the economy out of the mess it is in, is Larry Summers. We cannot trust Larry Summers. He’s in the pocket of the people responsible for our problems.

Among the firms that paid Summers large amounts in speaking fees include J.P. Morgan Chase. That bank offered the former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary $67,500 for a February 1, 2008 engagement. It has received $25 billion in government bailout funds.

Citigroup, which has received $50 billion in taxpayer help, paid Summers $45,000 for a speech in March 2008 and another $54,000 for a speech that May.

Goldman Sachs, which has received $10 million in bailout funds, paid Summers $135,000 for a speech on April 16, 2008 and another $67,500 for a speech on June 18, 2008.

Summers also received about $5.2 million over the past year in salary from the major hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

I know whose side Larry Summers is on, and it isn’t the middle class or the poor.

Another question: what does a $135,000 speech sound like? I come from an academic background, where we fairly routinely bring in scientists to give lectures and spend a day talking with colleagues, and it’s fairly dense stuff, with lots of information. We generally pay travel costs (of course) and an honorarium of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. It’s very good value for the money. There are popular heavy-hitters like Richard Dawkins who can get $10,000 for a talk, but even there they may waive the fee, as we saw in Oklahoma, and even so, they can pack an auditorium with thousands of people who want to hear what they have to say.

Would thousands of people line up to buy tickets to hear Larry Summers speak? Does he really have the kind of significant information to transmit that would be worth a hundred thousand dollars for an hour of time? If so, I’d like to know more about these kinds of valuable speeches, because I’d love to pay off my entire mortgage with an afternoon’s work.

Of course, we all know that these speeches are irrelevant. It’s a way for organizations with a lot of power and money to funnel cash to individuals with a lot of influence in government…i.e., it’s a form of corruption, a kind of bribe. Even if it’s nominally legal, I hope Obama is smart enough to kick this shill for the financial empires off of his advisory team.

Glenn Greenwald has more to say on Summers. He calls the payoffs an “advanced bribe”.

Iowa allows same-sex marriages!

That Iowa. The state south of us: rural farm country, relatively conservative (well, maybe more moderate than conservative), and yet their supreme court has surprisingly made a strong and progressive decision. The Iowa Supreme Court has struck down laws prohibiting gay marriage as unconstitutional.

Polk County District Judge Robert Hanson found that the law violated the Iowa Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, and hurt gay and lesbian couples “in numerous tangible and intangible” ways

“Civil marriage in Iowa is the only gateway to an extensive legal structure that protects a married couple’s relationship and family in and outside the state,” Hanson ruled in Des Moines.

“Iowa reserves an unparalleled array of rights, obligations and benefits to married couples and their families, privileging married couples as a financial and legal unit and stigmatizing same-sex couples.”

Wow. I am impressed with our neighboring state. Can we get this kind of sensible support for equality in place here in Minnesota, too? How about nation-wide?

The creeping fungus of religion in government

A recent court decision went against the Bush administration, and also reveals some of the contemptible influence peddling that went on in that gathering of scoundrels. The subject was birth control, in particular Plan B and other forms of emergency contraception, and as many of you know, the Bushite regime dragged its feet with ridiculous deliberation in allowing the FDA to approve these forms of contraception, and effectively blocked them from public access. By hook and crook, by cheating and deception, and by lying to the people, as this court decision affirms. This is why we fight the inclusion of religion in government: it poisons everything.

This decision is remarkable in its detailed accounting of the corruption that religious viewpoints can wreak upon public policy. That the right-to-life community was able to derail the availability of emergency contraception so easily is a testament to how bad things truly were in the Bush Administration. It should be unnecessary to say this, but I will: Science, health, and healing should be the focus of the FDA. The pattern of conduct the district court decision reveals is lawless, not only with respect to FDA procedures, but also with respect to the constitutional right to obtain contraception established by the Supreme Court Griswold v. Connecticut. This is not the state’s role. Indeed, the imposition by the Bush FDA of the religious beliefs of some upon others who do not believe is antithetical to our system. The core of the Establishment Clause is intended to prevent this sort of substitution of religious reasoning for sound public policy decisionmaking.

But that era is over, right? Don’t start cheering yet.

President Bush seems not to have been able to make public decisions without reference to right-wing religious beliefs. That inclination was probably reinforced by his practice of having a weekly conference call with conservative Christian clergy.

It is troubling to learn that President Obama appears to have instituted the same practice of scheduled weekly consultation with clergy. While Presidents from the start have looked to their faith to give them courage and solace, and many have had a religious counselor for one-on-one discussions, the weekly call with a committee of clergy is quite different. It would be very hard to believe that the discussion does not veer away from spiritual counseling, and into public policy. And what other political interest groups get this kind of access to the President? Reading Judge Korman’s well-reasoned and well-supported decision in Tummino, one is reminded that one cannot assume that religious advising is always, or even usually, politically-neutral. Moreover, it is never accountable to the people, by constitutional design. The President, however, is.

Also, don’t forget that these so-called “spiritual leaders” use the credibility conferred by these weekly meetings to reinforce their political authority and push a political agenda on their flocks. It’s a tool that is abused and gives political leverage to people who are often the enemies of secularism.

Does anyone know who Obama’s consulting clergy are? These are people to be watched; I’d also like to see that we urge Obama to also listen to dissenting voices. Where’s the weekly consultation with atheists, I might ask? Or with scientists and engineers? Why is he wasting time with those pious con artists, anyway?

Illinois! You elected John Shimkus? What were you thinking?

You have to watch this loon making his case for how harmless global warming is in testimony with Lord Christopher Monckton (thanks, England…really, we have enough wacky ideologues without you sending yours over here). Monckton dismisses the problem of CO2 by claiming that CO2 levels were much higher in the pre-Cambrian, and that the stuff is just “plant food”.

It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

Yes, it is the material plants take up from the atmosphere to make sugar. It’s also a greenhouse gas. So? And what is this stuff about “saving the world”? It’s like the two of them are babbling about problems and arguments that no one is making — and we get more when Shimkus explain how he knows CO2 is not a problem. It’s because the Bible is the inerrant word of his god, and he knows god isn’t going to end the world with global warming.

The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.

Could one of you voters out there in Illinois take Shimkus aside and explain to him with short, simple words and short, simple sentences that global warming isn’t going to destroy the world? It’s not an argument anyone is making. It could very well make the world more tropical, and it could be of some advantage to certain kinds of plants.

However, please note: human beings aren’t plants (well, most of us, anyway — John Shimkus does seem to share some similarities with root vegetables). The concern with global warming is change that will cause economic disruption and environmental disturbances and damage to places we like…like cities. Honestly, if nations collapse, we know that algae will still thrive. We just happen to generally take the side of humanity.

Oh, and you might let him know that the Bible is mostly wrong.

Suspected criminal Richard Dawkins under investigation

It’s been confirmed: members of the Oklahoma legislature are investigating the suspicious circumstances of Richard Dawkins’ lecture. After all, what possible excuse could UO have for inviting a known rabblerouser who doesn’t happen to believe in gods? Other than his reputation as a world-famous scientist, writer, and speaker, of course.

Sure enough, I just received confirmation today in a letter from the Open Records Office at the University of Oklahoma. The letter confirms that on the day of Dawkins’ speech, Oklahoma State Representative Rebecca Hamilton requested substantial information relating to the speech from Vice President for Governmental Relations Danny Hilliard. Representative Hamilton’s exhaustive request included demands for all e-mails and correspondence relating to the speech; a list of all money paid to Dawkins and the entities, public or private, responsible for this funding; and the total cost to the university, including, among other things, security fees, advertising, and even “faculty time spent promoting this event.”

Rick Farmer, the director of committee staff for the Oklahoma House of Representatives, also wrote the University on March 12, requesting confirmation that Dawkins had indeed waived all compensation for the speech.

It’s actually too bad that Dawkins waived his fee — he was well within his rights to ask for it, and the university had the right to invest in bringing interesting ideas to campus. The issue is not whether speakers should be paid, it’s whether these witch-hunters are overstepping their bounds. Don’t like an idea that’s being expressed at a university? Call out the hounds and make ’em sweat.

In other surprising news, ERV seems to have a low opinion of the investigators.

Eroding our intellectual infrastructure

One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides to defer their replacement for a year or two or indefinitely; the remaining faculty scramble to cover the manpower loss. We can continue to do our jobs, but behind the scenes, the stresses simply grow and worsen.

I can testify to this from personal experience. My biology department struggles every year with the routine business of retirements and sabbatical leaves — we have absolutely no fat in this group, with every member playing an essential role in the curriculum, so every departure, even temporary ones, increases the strain. We have to frantically rearrange schedules to cover our deficits, we have to drop courses for a year (so the students have to juggle their schedules as well), and we hang by our fingernails waiting for the administration to do basic things, like approve temporary hires or allow us to do a search for replacement faculty. Since the state is contributing less and less every year, we will soon reach a point where we simply won’t be allowed to replace essential personnel, and then the whole system is going to break down.

The University of Florida has reached that point. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been told to cut 10% from its budget. Since the biggest chunk of any university’s budget is salaries, that means a lot of people are going on the chopping block — and the administration has decided to simply get rid of entire departments wholesale, including geology. Think about it: a college of science that simply cuts off and throws away an entire discipline. Is that really a place that is supporting science and education? The partitions we set up with these labels are entirely arbitrary, and we are all interdependent. My own discipline of biology is dead without mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and yes, geology is part of the environment we want our students to know. Now it’s true that if all we aimed to do was churn out pre-meds, we could dispense with geology; heck, we could toss out all those ecologists, too, and hone ourselves down to nothing but a service department for instruction in physiology and anatomy.

But we wouldn’t be a university anymore. We’d be a trade school.

The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we’re accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It’s a lie. We’re being steadily eroded away, and all that’s holding it up right now is the desperate struggles of the faculty within it. We’re at the breaking point, though, where the losses can’t be supported much more, and the whole edifice is going to fall apart.

Here’s what you need to do. Write to the University of Florida administration and explain to them that what they’re doing is debilitating, and is going to irreparably weaken the mission of the university. Unfortunately, their hands are probably tied; they’ve got a shrinking budget and have to cut somewhere, and they will do so, but at this point all we can do is ask them to hold off on completely destroying a scientific asset.

The next layer of the problem is the state government. They keep seeing the educational system as a great target for saving money with budget cuts, because the effects will not be manifest for several years — and so they steadily hack and slash and chop, and the universities suffer…and now they’re at the point where they begin to break, and they keep cutting. Write to the Florida legislature! Tell them that we need to support higher education, that as a scientific and technological nation, we are dependent on a well-educated citizenry!

It’s not just Florida, either — your state is blithely gutting its system of higher education, too. Minnesota, for instance, has cut investment in higher ed by 28% between 2000 and 2007, while raising tuition 68% over the same period. We haven’t been given less to do, either — our workload increases while salaries fail to keep up with inflation. This is happening everywhere. We are all Florida.

Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.

Gary Goodyear “believes” in “evolution”

The Canadian science minister who first refused to answer a question about his support for religion because it was querying his personal religion has now flip-flopped and said that he does accept evolution. Only it’s a very twisted version of evolution. What does it mean when he says something like this?

We are evolving every year, every decade. That’s a fact, whether it is to the intensity of the sun, whether it is to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment. But that’s not relevant and that is why I refused to answer the question. The interview was about our science and tech strategy, which is strong.

I’ll tell you what it means: it doesn’t matter whether he believes in any kind of evolution (and trust me, that explanation doesn’t touch the subject), because we can tell right away that the man is an incompetent moron who is going to flush Canadian science down the tube.

What the heck is wrong with you, Australia?

The Australian government is trying to censor the internet. They have a blacklist of over 1300 sites — to be expanded to 10,000 — to which it is illegal to link, with violations costing you as much as $11,000 a day.

This doesn’t work, except as part of a package of tools for oppressing citizens. I did not have the impression that that was a road Australians wanted to travel upon.

You have our sympathies, Canada

We other Americans, the ones down south in the United States, have been wrestling with this problem for a long time. Sometimes, you just get flaming idiots in charge of important bureaucracies. Sometimes they even get handed the keys to the administration of important scientific institutions. And then they open their mouths and show off how stupid they are, and we poor peons get to sit back and watch the spectacle of money being shoveled into the hands of the incompetent for a while.

Canada has Gary Goodyear, the chiropractor who has been vaulted into the position of minister in charge of science and technology. He does not have a good reputation — his management style leaves much to be desired, and likes to accuse scientists of conspiring to lie to the public — and there are suspicions that he is a closet creationist, so he was recently asked outright if he believed in evolution.

“I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

I think the answer to that one was, “No, no I don’t, Bob.” The giveaway? He wasn’t asked if he was an atheist, he was asked if he accepted a basic scientific fact, and he immediately ran to hide behind the robes of whatever flavor of clueless cleric he favors. That’s creationist behavior, alright.

So, Canada, how long until you give this sorry sad sack the boot?