cool presentation of the universal declaration of human rights

I don't know anything at all about the U.S. Human Rights Action Center, which made the short, but their ask at the end of the video is that governments should put the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into passports. Very cool.

don't confuse principled opposition to bailouts with union busting

Word is out: the successful Republican effort to block bridge loans (note, loans, not bailouts) for the American auto industry has nothing to do with principles and everything to do with anti-union sentiment. Yes, the new Party of the South is Anti-Union.

I amuse myself too easily.

From the LAT Op/Ed:

[Senate Republicans] claimed that they couldn't support the bill without specifics about how wages would be "restructured." They didn't, however, require such specificity when it came to bailing out the financial sector. Their grandstanding, and the government's generally lackluster response to the auto crisis, highlight many of the problems that have caused our current economic mess: the lack of concern about manufacturing, the privileged way our government treats the financial sector, and political support given to companies that attempt to slash worker's wages.

When one compares how the auto industry and the financial sector are being treated by Congress, the double standard is staggering. In the financial sector, employee compensation makes up a huge percentage of costs. According to the New York state comptroller, it accounted for more than 60% of 2007 revenues for the seven largest financial firms in New York.

At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Hundreds of billions were given to the financial-services industry with barely a question about compensation; the auto bailout, however, was sunk on this issue alone.

Average salary of a UAW worker: $58,000/year.

Average salary of a Goldman Sachs worker: $622,000/year.

Whose compensation is bringing their industry and businesses down again?

on philanderer sen. david vitter (r-la)

I don't know what Sen. Vitter has against GM or the United Auto Workers or the entire domestic auto industry; whatever it is, whatever he thinks we've done, it's time for him to forgive us, just like Sen. Vitter has asked the citizens of Louisiana to forgive him.... He'd rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers.

- Morgan Johnson, UAW Local 2166 President in Shreveport, LA.

in case the banking crisis was unclear...

second apia on obama's cabinet: dr. steven chu at doe

Or perhaps we can call this "The Vindication of Wen Ho Lee."


image Fred R. Conrad, NYT

Yes, it's true, hard as it is to believe. Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the grand jury indictment of Doctor Wen Ho Lee (seriously, he was indicted on 10 December 1999), Taiwanese American scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratories, the culmination of a Clinton-Richardson-Republican-Media witch-hunt for "Chinese spies" that led to one of the most public instances of racial profiling and racist public smearing of APIAs in recent history (the other, of course, being the massive civil liberties abuses faced by South Asian Americans and Muslim Americans following the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington). In case you don't remember the Wen Ho Lee case, it might be summarized as follows:

[O]n March 6, 1999 when the New York Times prints a front-page story about a security breach at Los Alamos involving one of the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear warhead, the W-88. The FBI, concerned that their prime suspect will learn about their investigation and flee the country, decide to confront Dr. Lee and try to extract a confession from him. He is taken to a room without an attorney for himself present and threatened with the electric chair unless he cooperates with their investigation.

Two days after the March 6 article, he is personally fired by then Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson. His employment at Los Alamos is terminated, and his name is leaked to the press. He becomes publicly known as the scientist who betrayed his country and passed along nuclear secrets to China. Eventually, he is arrested and indicted on 59 counts of violating provisions from the Atomic Energy Act and Espionage Act. At one of his bail hearings, senior lab directors testify that the material he supposedly has in his possession are the "crown jewels" of the nuclear weapons arsenal and "would change the global strategic balance" if fallen into the wrong hands.

The presiding judge, Judge James Parker -- presented with such captivating testimony -- decides that no amount of restrictions before the trial could be imposed on Dr. Lee could guarantee the safety of the nation. He orders solitary confinement with handcuffs attached to a metal belt and shackles at the ankle belt and exercise for only one hour a week. The harsh conditions imposed would eventually spark public demonstrations and widespread outrage within the Chinese American and scientific community, despite a lot of initial reluctance and doubt about helping Dr. Lee in the beginning.

Eventually, the case would fall apart, thanks in part to a dedicated defense team, affadavits filed on behalf of Dr. Lee, and favorable testimony given during subsequent hearings.

The judge issued an apology which can be read in full here.

In just under a decade, we have gone from a Secretary of Energy who was more than willing to demonize and scapegoat APIAs--Chinese Americans specifically--to an APIA, Chinese American Secretary of Energy. This is not as massive of a historical moment as a Black American becoming President, but it is pretty huge for the APIA community. It's progress and change that we can believe in.

Of course, Dr. Steven Chu is a fantastic choice regardless of the historical implications. Here's a bit about him, from Science News:

The soft-spoken scientist is a heavyweight. For developing a new technique to laser cool and trap atoms, Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. However, his passion in recent years has become a search for the ever-more-parsimonious use of energy. He’s been exploring the development of not only new technologies but also novel social and economic policies that will lead businesses and the public to accomplish more while using far fewer resources.

In other words, he’ll come to Washington with a host of ideas — and a commitment to see that science will underpin DOE’s decision making and research priorities. Indeed, just three months ago Chu was stumping on the Hill about the need to bolster federal research investments in energy — investments that he said should be grounded on science. He’ll now get the unparalleled opportunity to try and practice what he preached.

Chu has called for an "Apollo Program" for new energy sources:

You’ve said the United States needs to launch an energy research program that’s comparable to the Apollo mission. What did you mean?

That we need big investments and that our country needs to act quickly. In that respect, the programs would be similar. But the Apollo mission was essentially an engineering project with one goal: Put a man on the moon. And cost was not an issue. The energy situation is very different.

Today, carbon emissions are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. They’re there but largely ignored by most people. Industry is waking up to the importance of these. But industry is also reluctant to invest in transformational technologies that won’t pay for themselves within 10 years. This means that effective technologies have to be affordable.

What do you mean by transformational technologies?

They have to be revolutionary, the way transistors changed electronics or fertilizers changed agriculture. They must allow us to do much more with less—and in an entirely new way.

If you asked people 100 years ago whether our planet could feed 6 billion people, the answer would have been no, because we didn’t have high-yielding plants. But with fertilizers and advanced crops, today we can feed billions.

Of President-elect Obama's various policy areas, I think that his ability to make bold and impactful changes in energy is one of the most exciting, with not only environmental but job creation implications. I'm pretty sure having a Nobel Prize-winning physicist around is going to help get us there.

happy human rights day

Today is the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights!

Get some.

repubs' path to victory: dems f'ing up

From Chris Bowers:

I'm starting to see a pretty easy path for Republicans to regain power. All they need is, first, for every Democratic leader to keep saying how great it is for Republicans to share power. Next, they need Democrats to keep making people like Robert Gates, instead of Dick Cheney or George Bush, the national face of the Republican Party. Those two messages will keep electing Republicans for years to come, and it will be entirely our own fault.

This is time to celebrate the Democratic Party's brand, not run away from it. Sure, we need to reach across the aisle, but that doesn't mean we need to campaign for the Republicans, much less give them jobs that make them look good. But I suppose that's just my failure to buy into how wonderful post-partisanship is... as it has often been said, we can't say accurately that partisanship is the problem in Washington, since we haven't had a partisan Democratic Party in power since 1981.

Also, I agree with Chris that Gen. Eric K. Shinseki should have been rewarded for being correct about Iraq with a much larger national security position, such as Secretary of Defense.

shinseki at veterans affairs; first apia nominee to obama's cabinet

From the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus:

“Gen. Shinseki has the personal experience and dedication needed to fight as hard for our returning veterans as they have for our country,” said Rep. Mike Honda, chair of CAPAC. “Gen. Shinseki is a friend and will be a strong advocate on behalf of all veterans, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. I proudly applaud President-elect Obama’s selection of the General as his secretary of Veterans Affairs. The President-elect continues to bring the best and brightest onto his team, reflecting America’s diversity.”

Gen. Shinseki, who served on two combat tours during the Vietnam War, is the first Asian American four-star general and the only Asian American to serve as the Army’s chief of staff in 1999. In addition to his longtime military service, Gen. Shinseki is also the national spokesperson for Go for Broke National Education Center, a nonprofit dedicated to telling the story of the segregated Japanese American units during World War II.

President-elect Barack Obama has also announced three Asian Americans for senior White House positions. Peter Rouse will serve as Senior White House Advisor; Chris Lu, executive director of the Presidential Transition Team, has been announced as the White House Cabinet Secretary; and Tina Tchen, a prominent litigator from Chicago, will serve as the Director of Public Liaison in the White House.

Not mentioned in the article is the fact that Gen. Shinseki was removed as the Chief of Staff of the Army for daring to question the lack of preparation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Shinseki, some will remember, was famously one of the voices in the military who argued that overthrowing the Iraqi government would require a massive number of troops. As the New York Times reported in February, 2003:

In a contentious exchange over the costs of war with Iraq, the Pentagon's second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general's assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.

[...]

"The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark," Mr. Rumsfeld said. General Shinseki gave his estimate in response to a question at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday: "I would say that what's been mobilized to this point — something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers — are probably, you know, a figure that would be required." He also said that the regional commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, would determine the precise figure.

A spokesman for General Shinseki, Col. Joe Curtin, said today that the general stood by his estimate. "He was asked a question and he responded with his best military judgment," Colonel Curtin said. General Shinseki is a former commander of the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

As we know, the initial entry into Iraq with insufficient troops resulted in massive looting of both cultural treasures and Iraq's substantial armory, both catastrophic losses in their own way, and the latter resulting in the arming of the Iraqi insurgency, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 44,000 Iraqi civilians, 8800 Iraqi Security Forces, over 4500 coalition troops including over 4200 U.S. troops (not to mention over 30,000 wounded U.S. servicemembers), 445 mercenaries/contractors, and 135 journalists. Undoubtedly, invasion and occupation in any form results in great losses and suffering, but the complete lack of disregard for planning by the Bush Administration and Rumsfeld Defense Department decimated Iraq's security, something that hasn't been recovered even to this day, over five years later.

So to the President-elect, congratulations to you for fulfilling your promise to appoint a cabinet that looks like America, but more importantly, for appointing someone who is sane. It shouldn't be a surprise, but after 8 years of madness, it feels incredibly satisfying.

there is no spoon... er, clean coal

Al Gore's new campaign against the myth of "clean coal":



Generally, "mythbusting" simply reinforces the myth. Satire, however, may yield better results.

all alone, together

Walked out this morning
Don't believe what I saw
A hundred billion bottles
Washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
A hundred billion castaways
Looking for a home

Fascinating feature in New York Magazine on New York City, living alone, and new research on loneliness. According to Alone Together: Is Urban Loneliness a Myth? by Jennifer Senior, over half of the households in New York City live alone, a fact that has long caused cultural critics (Mark Twain), authors (J.D. Salinger), and even fictional characters (Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, Mirenda of Sex in the City) to imagine New York City as the epitome of loneliness, a metropolis of islands.

That, of course, is something we should be concerned about. As Senior discusses, loneliness has very real health impacts, from over-eating and higher alcohol consumption to increased blood pressure, hypertension, obesity, and even a faster onset of Alzheimer's. But as the piece points out, whether someone is lonely or not can't be predicted by whether they live alone; the reality is a bit more complex, and surprising:

Given how many New Yorkers live alone—in Manhattan, 25.6 percent of households are married, whereas the national average is 49.7—one would think we’d be at an increased risk for practically all these conditions. But Cacioppo points out that loneliness isn’t about objective matters, like whether we live alone. It’s about subjective matters, like whether we feel alone. To determine how satisfied people feel with their relationships, research psychologists generally rely on a twenty-question survey called the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which breaks down our connections into three groups: intimate (whether we have a partner), relational (friends), and collective (church, colleagues, baseball teams, etc.).

The results of these surveys have crucial—and positive—consequences for urban environments. Loneliness, it turns out, is relative. Widows are likely to feel better in a community with more widows (Boca Raton, Florida, say) than a community with only a few single elderly women. And singles are likely to feel better in a town with more singles … like New York. It’s true that marriage is still the best demographic predictor of loneliness. But Cacioppo stresses it’s a very loose predictor. People can have satisfying connections in other ways, after all, and people in bad marriages might as well be on their own: Cacioppo’s latest study, based on a sample of 225 people in the Chicago area, shows that those in unhappy marriages are no less lonely than single people, and might even be more so.

Not to say that intimate relationships, marriage or otehrwise, are not important; all the researchers quoted in the story agree that intimacy is part of the puzzle for fighting loneliness. But it is only one part; equally important is having a network of friends, not even necessarily close friends, just other "weak ties" that expand your sphere of social knowledge. It is these "weak ties," acquaintances, work friends, former classmates, that are able to provide many of our social needs: finding a new job, taking political action, building stronger communities.

The other really fascinating part of this article was the connection it drew between living in a large urban center with increasing usage of the internet:

Think about it: Serendipitous encounters between people who know each other well, sort of well, and not at all. People of every type, and with every type of agenda, trying to meet up with others who share that same agenda. An environment that’s alive at all hours, populated by all types, and is, most of the time, pretty safe. What he was saying, really, was that New York had become the Web. Or perhaps more, even: that New York was the Web before the Web was the Web, characterized by the same free-flowing interaction, 24/7 rhythms, subgroups, and demimondes.

Hampton says he views the Internet as the ultimate city, the last stop on the continuum of human connectedness. I’d argue that New York and the Internet are about the same, in the way that a large bookstore feels like it offers just as many possibilities as Amazon.com—maybe slightly less inventory, but more opportunities to stumble on things you might not have otherwise. Whichever the case, what the Internet and New York have in common is that each environment facilitates interaction between individuals like no other, and both would be positively useless—would literally lose their raison d’être—if solitary individuals didn’t furiously interact in each. They show us, in trillions of invisible ways every day, that people are essentially nothing without one another. We may sometimes want to throttle our fellow travelers on the F train. We may on occasion curse our neighbors for playing music so loud it splits the floor. But living cheek-by-jowl is the necessary price we pay for our well-being. And anyway, who wants to ride the subway alone?

Which brings me to the Police video above (the 2007 Live Earth performance in, you guessed it, New York); even as Sting and the audience sing lyrics of loneliness, they're actually all part of the same song. Kind of cool.

post-election burn-out

I haven't had a substantive post here for over a week. I was trying to write about food over Thanksgiving, but couldn't put together something I was happy with.

I think it's post-election burn-out. Everyone who worked so hard and hoped for change made history, and now it's time for a nap. Or something like that. It's either that or winter setting in, but there's definitely a certain lethargy as the adrenaline and excitement of November 4th wears off, and we all remember that the economy is still in the tank, we still have two wars going on, and the planet is still melting. No one can think or do much of anything other than sit and wait until the next chapter begins. Until the shows starts. So for the time being, many of us just sit and think less-than-substantive thoughts.

Here are some of mine.

50 days until the inauguration of the most progressive president of our lifetime. There has been a lot of debate recently about pragmatism versus progressivism. I'm not going to get into the weeds of what is essentially a tactical argument about whether unwavering loyalty and blind trust or constant critique of the President-Elect is the best approach for progressives, but something struck me when I was reading these debates: when it comes to governance, progress and pragmatism are the same thing. Or in the negative, anything that is not progressive is not pragmatic.

Progressivism is pragmatic; in fact, it's the only rational approach. Progressivism stands for moving us forward: as families, as a country, as humans. It means not only finding the best and most just solutions for the problems we have, but governing in such a way that the quality of life for everyone gets better. It means using resources of all kinds--capital, labor, innovation, entrepreneurship, material--in a sustainable way that betters the community and individuals. Government, to govern, necessitates progress. A lack of progress is a lack of governance.

I will accept the argument that being pragmatic sometimes may not align with a traditional liberal ideology, which is fine by me as there are parts of liberalism with which I don't agree. Labor rights, for example, have always been progressive and often populist, but not always liberal; see, e.g., President Bill Clinton. But neither is pragmatism owned by the conservatives or moderates, and it is certainly not the case that pragmatism equals compromise. Conservative ideology, and moderate fetishization of compromise for that matter, cannot be pragmatic so long as they are anti-progressive. Compromise when necessary and prudent, and adoption of conservative ideas when they make sense, such as reducing wasteful spending or keeping in mind sustainability of budgets, these are pragmatic, but also progressive.

Random thoughts due to my inability to finish writing about milk or famine. 50 days.