Monthly Archives: January 2015

New Congress So Far (Be Afraid)

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This is just the stuff that happened yesterday.

The House passed its “dynamic scoring” bill directing the Congressional Budget Office to lie about the real effects of legislation on the budget. See also Jonathan Chait, “Why the Republican Congress’s First Act Was to Declare War on Math.”

This story provides a clue why the Republicans are determined to take the CBO in hand and dictate what conclusions it will reach:

One of the House Republican leadership’s first bills of the new Congress will add some $53 billion to the deficit and cost hundreds of thousands of Americans health insurance, according to a new report by Congress’ non-partisan budget office.

The bill, the Save American Workers Act, aims to redefine the number of hours that people work each week before their employers fall under the Affordable Care Act, raising the threshold from 30 hours to 40. Under current law, larger firms that don’t provide health insurance for people who work more than 30 hours will be fined. The bill would raise the fine threshold to 40 hours.

Republicans argue that by requiring companies to provide health benefits to anyone who works more than 30 hours, the Affordable Care Act creates an incentive for employers to cut hours to less than 30. Analysts say there is no evidence of that alleged trend, however, and a new report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that involuntary part-time work has actually fallen since the peak of the recession and the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

The Congressional Budget Office “score” of the bill released Wednesday suggested the shift proposed by the bill could actually worsen the healthcare situation, even as it raises costs to taxpayers.

Republicans can’t have the CBO saying things like that, can they?

Two House Republicans introduced a national 20-week abortion ban. Reps. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said that 20 weeks is “very late term.” Huh? A full-term pregnancy is 40 weeks. Even I can calculate that 20 weeks is the mid point, not “very late.”  Also, too:

Franks compared late abortions to torture in a statement released with the bill.

“More than 18,000 ‘very late term’ abortions are performed every year on perfectly healthy unborn babies in America,” Franks said Tuesday.

“These are innocent and defenseless children who can not only feel pain, but who can survive outside of the womb in most cases, and who are torturously killed without even basic anesthesia.”

I don’t know about the number of abortions at 20 weeks or later in the U.S., but at this time it’s the broad consensus of medical science that a fetus at 20 weeks gestation lacks the nervous system apparatus required to feel pain (see “Navigating the Junk Science of Fetal Pain“).  And no infant born at 20 weeks gestation has ever survived outside the womb in recorded history. The threshold of viability currently is between 22 and 25 weeks, and at the very early end of that a fetus is so impaired that most of the time palliative care only is recommended.

But I haven’t gotten to the best part yet. See Teresa Tritch in the New York Times: “Uh Oh, Republicans Are Trying to ‘Protect’ Social Security Again.”

Buried in the new rules being adopted by the House Republican majority for the current session of Congress is one that the drafters say will “protect” Social Security retirement benefits from being raided to pay for Social Security disability benefits. What this boils down to is using a misleading argument to tee up benefit cuts.

You can read the article for details, but basically the GOP is “fixing” something that ain’t broke. Michael Hiltzik writes at the Los Angeles Times that their “fix” prohibits reallocating money from the retirement fund into the disability fund without  “benefit cuts or tax increases that improve the solvency of the combined trust funds.” But there was no reason to do that; the disability allocations were not putting the retirement fund in jeopardy. But if this goes through, Hiltzik says, the most likely outcome will be that disability benefits will be cut by 20 percent sometime next year.

It begins.

The Massacre in Paris

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[Republished from Rethinking Religion blog.] Gunmen killed 12 people in the offices of a Paris satire magazine today. It’s widely assumed — and probably true — that the attacks were in retaliation for the magazine’s lampooning of militant Islam, although so far the “perps” have not been identified officially. In response, rightie blogs are having an insufferable self-righteousness orgy, and Richard Dawkins blames Islam. All of it.

Here is a page of cartoonists’ tributes to the magazine, Charlie Hebdo. I thought this one got closest to the truth of it.

charliehebdo

Assuming the gunmen are fanatical Islamists seeking to “punish” the magazine — Yes, they assumed their righteousness trumped other peoples’ lives. Right now a lot of not-Islamic people are going to the same place. It ain’t the religion, folks, or at least not the religion by itself — see “Religious Violence Isn’t Just Religious.”

Read more about religious violence in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.

Keystone Cop-outs

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Along with dynamic scoring, aka fantasy budgeting, another issue to be pushed by congressional Republicans is approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline. There’s a nice op ed in The Hill explaining why Keystone XL is not in our national interest. The main points.

It’s not much of a jobs-creator. “The pipeline company, TransCanada, told the U.S. State Department the pipeline would create 35 permanent U.S. jobs. That’s about half as many workers as it takes to run a McDonald’s.” Further, it will create fewer than 2,000 temporary constructions jobs, and if those are such great jobs why don’t we spend some money and put people to work fixing public infrastructure, hmm?

For that matter, remember when righties cheered when Gov. Chris Christie killed the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) rail tunnel that would have gone under the Hudson River and provided better connections between New Jersey and midtown Manhattan?

The project would have eased overcrowding in Penn Station by building a new rail station at 33rd Street and 7th Avenue on the West Side of Manhattan, and it would have generated 5,700 construction jobs and 44,000 permanent jobs, and increased home values in towns that would now have one-seat service to Manhattan, the study noted.

Yes it cost money, buckets of which the feds had already handed over for the project, and much of which Christie had to hand back. It would have been good for the economies of both New Jersey and New York City and added a lot of value to a lot of businesses. Not to mention lightened the aggravation factor of trying to commute into Manhattan, which half of New Jersey seems to do every day.

And keep in mind that New Jersey under Christie has had terrible job growth numbers. Under Christie, New Jersey jobs growth has been among the slowest in the nation. I’m pretty sure New Jersey beats Kansas, but not many other states. Most damning is that New Jersey has lagged way behind all its neighboring states in jobs growth, especially Delaware and New York.

But we’re talking about the Keystone XL Pipeline. Noting that a lot of the same people who applauded Christie’s killing of the tunnel project are now claiming that Keystone XL is needed to provide jobs, let’s go on to the next point.

The Keystone XL oil is not going to provide more gas for U.S. cars. The oil isn’t for us; it’s meant to be refined and shipped overseas. I think most of the people who support it have some notion that as soon as the pipeline is built all kinds of cheap gas will show up at the local Shell station. It won’t.

If something goes wrong, it could go really really awful bad wrong and cause long-term disaster. The tar sands oil is really dirty oil, the article says, and if it spills or leaks it’s even harder to clean up than most oil. The pipeline is intended to go through many critical wetlands and agricultural areas, and a leak or spill could do huge amounts of damage that no doubt would cost U.S. taxpayers dearly to clean up.

In Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, the pipeline would run within a mile of more than 3,000 wells that provide drinking and irrigation water. It would also cross 1,073 rivers, lakes and streams — from the Yellowstone River in Montana to the Platte River in Nebraska — along with tens of thousands of acres of wetlands. Pipeline blowouts are not rare events, and the transport of tar sands oil threatens all those resources. Between 1994 and late 2014, there were nearly 6,000 pipeline blowouts or other serious incidents, spilling a cumulative 100 million gallons of oil and other hazardous liquids. A spill of tar sands crude, which has proven more damaging and difficult to clean up than conventional oil, would make matters worse.

Bottom line, it’s a hugely risky project that would provide very little benefit to the United States and its citizens. Note that a many Canadians want to stop the tar sands oil extraction because it’s doing a lot of environmental damage in Canada.

A pro-pipeline article argues that absent a pipeline, the crude oil is being transferred by train, which (it argues) is even less secure than a pipeline. Also making the oil available on the world’s oil economy would stop OPEC from messing with prices. And, of course, the real long-term answer to that is to learn to be less dependent on fossil fuel, period. Between the deep ocean drilling that caused the contamination of the Gulf of Mexico that still hasn’t been cleaned up properly to the Keystone disaster-in-the-making, we’re basically tearing our planet apart trying to wring every last bit of fossil fuel out of it already. Is there anyone out there foolish enough to think this isn’t going to have to stop sometime, somewhere?

Well, yes, unfortunately. I guess there are.

The Relativity of Science

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We are nearing the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Yes, I know we’re all tingly with anticipation. But I do have a point.

Einstein had published a special theory of relativity in 1906, and both the special and general theories go way over my head, so I will not be explaining them. All I can tell you is that the famous E = mc2 equation came out in 1906.

However, the story goes, Einstein wanted to incorporate gravity into his theory. So he thought and thought, and then he came up with some mathematical equations to show how all this stuff he was thinking about might work. According to Wikipedia, “These equations specify how the geometry of space and time is influenced by whatever matter and radiation are present, and form the core of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.” Einstein presented these equations to the Prussian Academy of Science in 1915, and he published his General Theory of Relativity in 1916.

At that point, it was all arithmetic, using approximation methods, whatever those are. After the equations were published, more physicists studied and elaborated on the equations and came up with other mathematical models to explain stuff like black holes and the Big Bang. Einstein also kept working, and in 1917 he came up with a theory called the cosmological constant that assumed the cosmos is static, which later was shown to be not true. So the cosmological constant theory was tossed. But scientists continued to work on general relativity.

At the time Einstein published his general relativity equations, there was hardly any empirical data to corroborate them. Einstein had thought way outside the box and pushed concepts of the laws of physics way beyond what that had actually been tested or observed. That’s largely because at the time there was no way to test most of it.

As time went on a few things were observed that seemed to fit Einstein’s model, but serious testing of some parts of the theory didn’t begin until the 1950s, at a point technology made testing possible.  Through the years various tests and observations made possible by advances in technology have confirmed that matter and energy and whatnot do behave as Einstein had predicted they would.  And testing continues. In 2013 news stories announced that physicists had observed more stuff in space that provided an “unprecedented” test of Einstein’s predictions, and the predictions held. However,

Scientists know general relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915, isn’t the complete story. While it does very well describing large, massive systems, it’s incompatible with quantum mechanics, which governs the physics of the very small. For something extremely small, yet extremely massive — such as a black hole — the two theories contradict each other, and scientists are left without a physical description. [6 Weird Facts About Gravity]

So after all this time, gravity partly remains a mystery. Scientists are still not sure in all particulars exactly how gravity works. There’s still a lot about the universe that confounds the models and catches people off guard. Stephen Hawking wrote,

Despite having had some great successes, not everything is solved. We do not yet have a good theoretical understanding of the observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating again, after a long period of slowing down. Without such an understanding, we cannot be sure of the future of the universe. Will it continue to expand forever? Is inflation a law of Nature? Or will the universe eventually collapse again? New observational results and theoretical advances are coming in rapidly. Cosmology is a very exciting and active subject. We are getting close to answering the age old questions. Why are we here? Where did we come from?

I think Hawking is overstepping science with the “why” question, but I concede he’s a lot smarter than I am.

Science being what it is, it’s likely someday some physics nerd will publish a theory that shows how the discrepancies between Einstein’s work and quantum mechanics might be resolved, and then they’ll spend a century or so testing it. Science at this level is never settled.

Now on to today’s most contentious science issue — climate change. (I bet you can see where I’m going now.)

A Harvard professor on the history of science named Naomi Oreskes says that scientists today are being way too cautious with their climate change predictions.  “The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record, and across the globe climate change is happening faster than scientists predicted,” she writes.

Of course, in popular media we are perpetually being told that climate change is not happening at all, but let’s go on. Professor Oreskes continues,

Science is conservative, and new claims of knowledge are greeted with high degrees of skepticism. When Copernicus said the Earth orbited the sun, when Wegener said the continents drifted, and when Darwin said species evolved by natural selection, the burden of proof was on them to show that it was so. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this conservatism generally took the form of a demand for a large amount of evidence; in the 20th century, it took on the form of a demand for statistical significance.

We’ve all heard the slogan “correlation is not causation,” but that’s a misleading way to think about the issue. It would be better to say that correlation is not necessarily causation, because we need to rule out the possibility that we are just observing a coincidence. Typically, scientists apply a 95 percent confidence limit, meaning that they will accept a causal claim only if they can show that the odds of the relationship’s occurring by chance are no more than one in 20. But it also means that if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim. It’s like not gambling in Las Vegas even though you had a nearly 95 percent chance of winning.

Compare/contrast to the infamous “one percent doctrine” of Dick Cheney — if there is even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction the United States must act as if this were a certainty.  So we just need 1 percent proof to launch a war, but the Right now demands 100 percent proof before lifting a finger to address climate change.

Oreskes argues that scientists have been so well trained to avoid jumping to conclusions that practically no amount of empirical proof is good enough to dispel the qualifiers and the caution. In other words, in the world of science, nothing is ever settled. No scientific theory, even stuff that’s been accepted for generations and observed and tested to within an inch of its life, is ever placed beyond all doubt.

And the absolute worst sin, the thing that will get one booted out of the Science Club, is being thought of as too credulous. So no matter how many tons of empirical evidence one may collect to support one’s theories, lectures and published papers are always embroidered in language that gives the scientist an escape hatch if part of it is challenged by new data.

And then when powerful monied factions, such as the fossil fuel industry, find science inconvenient, the simplest way to discredit it is to point to the qualifiers and the caution. Scientists aren’t certain yet, so it’s too soon to act.

But scientists are never certain. They might be certain of a particular fact, like the boiling point of water, but on the level of theory they are never certain. There’s always something more that could be learned, on some level. That’s the catch.

It’s also the case that theories are big, complicated beasts that could be partly right and partly wrong, like Einstein’s General Relativity probably is mostly right except on a quantum physics level, where it seems to be missing something. So if data come in showing that some parts of a projection are not working as anticipated, this doesn’t necessarily mean the entire model is wrong. If several scientists independently come up with different projections that don’t match in all particulars, that doesn’t mean they have no idea what they’re doing and we should just ignore them.

As I understand it, climate change theory really didn’t get off the ground until the 1970s, which makes it relatively new. Data collected by satellites and such have provided scientists with huge amounts of information about the Earth’s climate and what affects it that wasn’t available before, and so even as they collect data and formulate predictions they’re still facing a huge learning curve. So it’s no wonder they don’t speak in absolutes, but with some caution.

At the same time, the denialists seize on every uncertainty and wave it around as “proof” that climate change science is entirely debunked. For example, although the earth keeps breaking heat records every year, for the past 16 years atmospheric temperatures have not changed. As far as the denialists  (I refuse to call them “skeptics”; skeptics are people who doubt and question, and denialism is just knee-jerk dogma) are concerned, this is “proof” all models showing climate change are just a hoax. Scientists actually have several explanations for why atmospheric temperatures are stable and expect the “hiatus” to reverse itself, possibly soon.

I started this post by talking about Einstein. Recently I had an exchange with a denialist who told me that science is “black and white” and based on empirical evidence,  and (he said) there is no empirical evidence for climate change. Actually there’s tons of empirical evidence; the challenge isn’t getting the evidence, but interpreting it. Unlike Einstein’s theory, which began as ideas expressed in mathematical equations that mostly weren’t tested with any thoroughness until after the great genius had died, and which still haven’t been completely proved after a century, climate change science grew out of the empirical evidence.

But when I brought up gravity as something that still isn’t understood in any “black and white” way, this individual claimed Einstein’s theories were entirely empirical, and I didn’t know what I was talking about. I even explained the testing history of the Theory of General Relativity and provided a dictionary definition of “empirical” — based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. He wouldn’t budge. Because Einstein’s theories have been proved correct today, he said, they were “empirical” all along.

And, you know, when someone is sunk that deeply into pure illogic, there’s not a whole lot one can do to change his mind. But while it’s futile to discuss any of this with the dogmatic denialists, I think it’s important to keep talking about this, because there are people out there who are not dogmatic denialists but just haven’t heard all the facts who might be persuaded.

BTW, this year might be the Year the Pope Stopped Being Catholic, as far as the Right is concerned. His Holiness Pope Francis is expected to issue either an edict or an encyclical, according to various news sources that probably don’t know the difference between an edict and an encyclical either, that climate change is a moral imperative that Catholics must address. Already Fox News has declared that Pope Francis has aligned himself with “environmental extremists who favor widespread population control and wealth distribution.” I project sooner or later they will declare the Pope is a God-hating liberal. With righties, either you’re with ’em, or you’re the enemy.

Cooking the Public Books

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The phrase for today, boys and girls, is “dynamic scoring.” We’ll likely be hearing a lot about dynamic scoring when the new Congress convenes, because dynamic scoring is high on the Republican agenda.

What is dynamic scoring? This has to do with the Congressional Budget Office, the doggedly nonpartisan office that analyzes whatever Congress is up to that might impact the federal budget. The CBO has always used what’s called “static scoring,” which actually isn’t all that static, to make projections.  Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former chief of staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, explains:

Whenever new tax legislation is proposed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office “scores” it, to estimate whether the bill would raise more or less revenue than existing law would.

In preparing estimates, scorekeepers try to predict how people will respond to a new tax law. For example, if Congress contemplates raising the excise tax on cigarettes, scorekeepers consider existing trends in cigarette consumption, the likelihood that the higher taxes will induce some smokers to quit, and the prospect that higher prices will increase incentives for cigarette smuggling. There are no truly “static” revenue estimates.

How would dynamic scoring be more dynamic? Might I remind you this is a Republican idea? Could you guess if I told you Paul Ryan is a big fan of dynamic scoring? That’s right, folks — dynamic scoring adds an assumption that tax cuts will raise revenues.

So if Republicans get their way, future CBO projections will will filled with rainbows, unicorns and confidence fairies.

 A lot of Republicans also want to replace the CBO chief to appoint someone who will reliably give them analyses more to their liking. In other words, they want to “capture” the CBO and turn it into a propaganda tool for the Republican Party. Whether they’re going to get away with this isn’t clear. Note that they object to the current guy, Doug Elmendorf, not because CBO projections have been wrong, but because they don’t always fit right-wing narratives.

Elmendorf’s term actually ends today, but apparently he’s going to stay on the job until Congress decides what it is doing. This may take awhile.

Same Old, Same Old

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I didn’t want to spend the first day of the new year crabbing about something. So I waited until the second day of the new year. However, it seems lots of stuff I might crab about today is basically old stuff. For example, the wingnuts are blaming President Obama because Cubans have no civil rights. Apparently they did until late last year. Who knew?

In the last days of the old year we shifted from toddlers blowing away themselves and each other to toddlers killing their mothers. These stories make me sad in ways I can’t even describe.

But the husband of the woman recently shot in the head while shopping at Wal-Mart, by her two-year-old who had found a firearm in her purse, isn’t angry at the NRA. He’s not angry at the manufacturer of the purse that was designed for concealed carry. He’s only angry because some people are politicizing his wife’s death.

But if some of us had done a better job of “politicizing,” his wife might be alive now. Likewise the Oklahoma mother who was killed by her toddler while changing her infant’s diaper.

Apparently the Idaho mother, by all accounts an intelligent person, wouldn’t leave her home without a sidearm. Why? Crime statistics for Blackfoot, Idaho, suggest that her chances of being a victim of violent crime during a daytime trip to a Wal-mart were only slightly larger than being smashed by a falling space station.

And speaking of odds, we actually do not know how often children accidentally shoot someone. And the rate of accidental gun deaths among children is likely higher than officially reported. There is data going way back that keeping a loaded gun at home is a particular danger for children. Doesn’t seem to ever matter, though, does it?