Walter In Denver

Don't Know Much

The NY Times today brings us the story of one Dr. Jon D. Miller, who makes it his business to track the scientific literacy rate of U.S. citizens:

His findings are not encouraging.

While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert," he said in an interview. Most of the rest "don't have a clue." At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process.
[...]
Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

Yes that is bad. But, ignorance of scientific knowledge isn't a disqualifier for holding high office in the German government:

Germany's environment minister hinted Tuesday that Americans were to blame for Hurricane Katrina due to the U.S. refusal to cut greenhouse gases which many experts say cause global warming.

"The increasing frequency of these natural events can only be explained through global warming which is caused by people," said [Juergen] Trittin who is member of the Greens in a ZDF TV interview.

Trittin contrasted Germany's cutting of greenhouse gas emissions by 18.5 per cent since 1990, with the U.S. from which emissions have continued to increase.

"A U.S. citizen causes about two and a half times as much greenhouse gas as the average European," said Trittin.

Which would explain why Europe has fewer hurricanes, I guess.

Katrina Updates

Sunny and dry here, but a thousand miles away...

Matt at at Overtaken by Events is live blogging from the storm, and worried about his mom-in-law.

Brendan Loy is updating his site frequently, and Josh Britton is doing the same from Louisiana.

The Times-Picayune has a breaking news blog, with better coverage than the cable networks.

Inspiring

Back in 1986 James Randi caught a faith healer, one Peter Popoff, using a radio transmitter to, well, do this:

Peter Popoff, like many faith healers, calls out the names, illnesses, and sometimes addresses of people at his crusades, then "lays hands" on them and prays for their healing. The impression given at such services is that the information comes directly from God; indeed, a magazine distributed by Popoff's organization described an audience member being "called out by the Spirit for healing". Those in the audience are so impressed by Popoff's "Gift of Knowledge" that they break into applause. The subjects picked are so overwhelmed that they often break into tears. One woman who was "healed" at one of the meetings and later interviewed by CSER stated: " know he is real from the way he talked. He actually knew my address and had no notes to look at! he is real, all right!"
[...]
When world-famous magician and psychic investigator James Randi and his close magician friend Steve Shaw first attended a Popoff healing, they noticed that Popoff "called out" people from the audience fast and accurately. He gave their ailments, named relatives, and even threw in an occasional street address for good measure. After Randi and Shaw had observed Popoff dealing with twenty or so people, it was obvious to them that Popoff was not using some mnemonic device. Shaw told Randi, "He's got something else going for him, and I think I know what I have to do." Randi agreed and sent Steve to get a closer look at Popoff. Steve noticed that Popoff was wearing a hearing aid in his left ear. (That device is somewhat unusual for someone who claims to be able to perform miraculous healings.) You can see the shiny plastic in there, clear as can be, Shaw told Randi.
[...]
Alec Jason and his assistant, Bob Steiner, had hardly set up the tape recorder and turned on the scanner before the scanner zeroed in on frequency 39.17 Megahertz (MHz). The feminine voice boomed loud and clear over their private earphones, "Hello, Petey. I love you! I'm talking to you. Can you hear me? If you can't, you're in trouble, 'cause I'm talking as well as I can!" (Her voice suddenly becomes business like.) "I'm looking up names right now." Jason and Steiner knew that they had struck pay dirt! The funny thing about it was that it turned out that God was a woman; God spoke on frequency 39.17 MHz (in a band width normally used only by police and fire departments); and God sounded exactly like Popoff's wife Elizabeth.

With the help of the scanner, Jason and Steiner were able to hear and record the entire conversation. Elizabeth: "Way over to the other side on the other balcony is Josephine Parino. Run all the way over to the right side now. Josephine Parino. Josephine Parino." Popoff asks the assembled worshipers: "Who's Josephine?" Elizabeth" Parino. Popoff Parino. Josephine Parino identifies herself. "Elizabeth: She's got cancer of the stomach." Transcribing the tape later on, Randi, Jason, and Steiner heard such comments as: "I have a hot one for you. Robert Kaywood. He's got a chest condition that needs surgery. Robert Kaywood. Kaywood. Kaywood. He needs surgery. His veins aren't formed. He prays that God will heal him today. Later on, they heard: "Dear, she...no, she should be there on your right side. Right side. No, that's not her! No, that's not her! In the blue... Oh! That might be here. Okay. She lives at 4267 Masterson, and she's praying for her daughter Joy, who's allergic to food." This was followed by laughter from Elizabeth and Pam, the wife of Reeford Shirrell (Popoff's number two man). Elizabeth Popoff was out of the audience's view but apparently able to see her husband via TV monitors.

The story goes on. If you think you've heard it before, you probably have. Randi appeared on Johnny Carson's show and told the world.

You might think that would be enough to ruin a preacher's career, but Popoff is still at it. You can buy his book, Prosperity Thinking, and a sample of 'Miracle Spring Water' here.

Kind of reminds me of Horatio Alger, that guy.

New Tech

According to Colorado Pols, Rep. gub candidate Marc Holtzman held a town hall style meeting with voters - entirely by phone:

The way it works is with a robo-dialer on crack and a computer screen. From one telephone, Holtzman talks to "guests" as the program dials 600 numbers a second. If the dialer gets an answering machine, it goes to a pre-recorded message in which Holtzman says that he was calling to invite you into a "Town Hall Meeting." If you pick up the phone, you are asked to dial '1' to enter into the "town hall" forum. At that point, you can just sit and isten to the Q&A underway, or if you choose, you can ask a question of Holtzman yourself. If you refuse to take part, an electric shock sends 10,000 volts through your spine.

Okay, so we made that last part up.

A computer screen monitors who is on the line -- as many as 50,000 people at one time could take part -- and from the screen you can see who is on the line, how long they stay, and if they want to ask a question. By pressing '#' the caller is placed in a queue to ask a question or order something from the deli counter. All of this is done in real-time, and the candidate only needs to talk on a regular telephone. The callers have no idea who else in actually on the line, until they hear the questions.

This is intriguing, and it raises a number of questions. Will voters resist these calls the same as other automated calls? How do they screen calls? Seems that one sour apple could spoil the event.

Is it legal to record these sessions? Considering the complexities of wiretap laws, I imagine there could be situations where recording is illegal. If thousands of participants are on the line, someone is bound to...

Vital Info

Via Tim Cavanaugh:

The 28 heaviest people ever. Interesting reading, really.

It's That Time Of Year

Time to start thinking about chili recipes. Steve has one of the secrets; add something sweet to the mix. Not that bakers chocolate is very sweet.

I always put something sweet in my green chile. Maybe I'll share sometime, and no, it's not chocolate.

Chocolate makes perfect sense as a chili ingredient. If you've ever tasted mole poblano, you know it has a different character in a meat dish than as a confectionary ingredient.

I don't know that I'll ever be confortable publishing any of my chili or chile recipes. They're always works in progress, and I always think I can make the next batch a little better.

I State the Obvious

It seems these days no one pays any attention to Pat Robertson until he says something really stupid.

Being Defined By Your Enemies

Reading this in The American Conservative; Defining Conservatism Down - As the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual challenge to the Left has diminished, by Austin Bramwell.

Interesting stuff, found via Tyler Cowen, who warns, "prepare to be offended if you are conservative or libertarian." Well, if that doesn't pique my interest....

Bramwell:

Had conservatism a Cassandra, she might, amidst the current mood of triumph, point out that whereas 50 years ago the American Right boasted several political theorists destined to exert a lasting influence, today it has not one to its credit. In the 1950s and ’60s, James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, and Willmoore Kendall (among others) were all at the apex of their powers. No figure of similar stature remains.

Red flag up yet? later...

Given this philosophical complacency, one would think that Kirk, Hayek, and others (including eccentric outsiders such as R.J. Rushdoony, L. Brent Bozell, and Ayn Rand) had left behind a commanding legacy. One would expect that, like Burke, they had articulated ideas so powerful that they can only be contended with, not refuted.

Yup, big problem here...

Has conservatism achieved this exalted stature? If we are honest, we must answer no.

[...]while American conservatives have retained their passion for Big Ideas, their passion for the biggest idea of all—the Holy Grail that will refute liberalism—has waned. Most simply assume that the Grail has already been found.

[...] Yet the Holy Grail has not been found. One can still find lapel-grabbing right-wingers who will argue late into the night that their favorite thinker has figured everything out for all time. (My personal favorite: certain libertarians believe that Alan Gewirth, a now forgotten philosopher of the 1970s, showed how the rightness of limited government derives ultimately from Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.) This is not the place to take up the argument with them. I only wish to observe, as an empirical matter, that no one person’s ideas actually define American conservatism. If English conservatism is nothing other than Burkeanism, American conservatism is not Rothbardianism, Randianism, Jaffaism, or Hayekianism.

That could be because Rand and Hayek ARE NOT CONSERVATIVES AT ALL.*

Sorry, was I shouting? Bramwell's not done yet:

No economic model can prove that government interference in the economy by nature tends to do harm. While economics can show that some government programs will fail—rent control, say, or confiscatory tax rates—it cannot show that all government programs will fail. As for the various moral arguments for libertarianism, they are even weaker. Liberal theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen have long since shown that libertarians simply fail to grasp the full dimensions of equal liberty, which does not demand, as libertarians would have it, that everyone should be equally free to starve, but that everyone should have a fair chance to pursue his goals freely. This principle may require a more active government than libertarians would allow.

It isn't fair to judge Bramwell's moral values from this short article, but I don't know what distinction he makes from economic values. Libertarianism doesn't hold equal liberty as a primary moral value. (As I understand, that term implies equal access to resources regardless of means.) Instead, libertarianism holds moral restrictions on government, not moral requirements on governments' performance.

Anyway, I agree with Bramwell in his indictment of conservative philosophy. And by happy coincidence, I came across this today. Hayek rejects conservatism:

At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change. In matters of current politics today they generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties. But, though the position I have tried to define is also often described as "conservative," it is very different from that to which this name has been traditionally attached. There is danger in the confused condition which brings the defenders of liberty and the true conservatives together in common opposition to developments which threaten their ideals equally. It is therefore important to distinguish clearly the position taken here from that which has long been known - perhaps more appropriately - as conservatism.

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves "liberals." I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism.

I too describe myself as a liberal, for the same reasons. Among conservatism's moral failings is the insistance on equating desirable results from government with moral action, more plainly, that the ends justify the means. When this libertarian says the political left and right are equivalent, this is what I mean.

^{*I'm surprised that any present day conservatives want to claim Rand as an ally, militant atheism and all.}

Out Of Date

I've been in the golf biz for over a decade now, and I see a misconception about the sport that pops up frequently. Here's a recent example:

[...] part of the appeal of golf is the fact that courses are so purposefully pretty. This, however, holds the major appeal of golf - the civilized appreciation of privilege. Golf is not a poor person's sport, nor is it a simple game to set up. You can drive or putt simply enough, but it takes an investment of at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a single game (building the course and all that). It's a game that's a social event, coupled with displays of power and finesse that are impressive, if mechanically aided. It involves competition and targeting, yes, but the simple fact of the matter is that golf isn't popular just because it's played on pretty courses. It's popular because of what a fixation on golf entails - the money, time and privilege to be able to have that fixation.

That's a view that's outdated by a couple of generations or so.

Here's a little primer on golf courses, not that you need it, but apparently many other people do. Broadly catagorized, there are three types of golf courses; private, resort, and daily fee courses.

Private courses are available usually only to members and their guests. Often these memberships are quite expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Naturally, only rich folks can afford membership, and this is where the snobbery occurs. Think Caddyshack. (There are some reasonably priced private courses, usually in small towns, where membership might run only a few hundred dollars annually.)

Resort courses are the ones you see in Vegas and other popular destinations, like the courses around Vail here in Colorado. The fee to play is often over $100, sometimes more than $200, just for a single round. Although pricey, many golfers do splurge once in a while, so middle class people make up the bulk of the play in this category.

Most of the tournaments on TV are played on courses in those first two categories, so a casual sports fan might get the impression that they represent the majority of the golf industry. Not true. The vast majority of golfers and rounds of golf played are at the daily fee courses. Many of these courses cost less than $25 to play, even less for an avid golfer with a season pass. A nine hole round in the evening might be closer to $10, and that compares pretty well to a movie ticket.

That golf isn't a poor people's sport is true, if you assume that only a tiny portion of the US population is poor, say something less than 10 %. By that measure, other activities outside of the reach of the poor include dinners at restaurants, surfing, camping, and owning a reliable car. Makes everyone else an elitist, no?

This is a particular sore spot to me because golf has become an access point for minorities into American society. Over the years I've been a regular player or employee at courses that are played primarily by hispanics, or, like the muni courses here in Denver, reflect the ethnic diversity in the City pretty accurately. If you want to see interaction between various ethnicities and income levels the golf course is the place to be.

While we're on the subject, Golf Views magazine has a feature on my friend Tom Woodard, one of the first African-Americans on the PGA tour, and now the most important golf executive in Colorado. (Sorry, no permanent link. Look for the Aug. issue.)

A Libertarian Case For Regulation

Richard Combs, solidly in favor of the right to self defense, observes:

On the other hand, I live in the city. My house sits less than 10 feet from the houses on either side. I'd really rather not have one of my neighbors storing hundreds of pounds of high explosives in the basement and assembling bombs. I think that would present an unreasonable risk to me, making my neighbor guilty of reckless endangerment. Therefore, some restrictions are justified.

I have a lot of problems with the way government regulates our society, but I'm not entirely against regulation.

As an example, let's look at traffic law, perhaps the most over-regulated part of American life. Traffic engineers routinely set speed limits lower than necessary. This leads to all kinds of abuse by local governments. Often they use traffic tickets not to promote public safety, but to generate revenue. A random and tax on motorists, if you will.

Because of those things I'm against speed limits as we currently know them. A car travelling at ten or fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit is probably maintaining a reasonably safe speed. Imagine, for example, a moderately busy street through a residential neighborhood. The speed limit will typically be around 30 MPH, but a driver could be safe at 40 MPH. Caught on police radar he'll get a ticket. Clearly unfair, to my mind. But on that same road a driver doing 90 MPH is a clear danger to pedestrians or other drivers, and I see no reason to wait until he actually injures someone for the police to stop him.

That is indeed a form of regulation, and it's similar to what Richard is talking about, but it's not similar to what we presently know as regulation.

Nice

This is the most important - and best - news I've heard today:

U.S. productivity began to grow quickly again in the late 1990's, and there now are enough data to suggest that this change is for real. Between 1995 and 2004, U.S. output per worker grew at a 2.9% annual rate, even faster than the impressive pre-1973 pace. It's hard to attribute this to a change in any of those factors thought to have contributed to the slowdown in the seventies. Instead, the good news seems to be the result of a new set of favorable developments, chief among which is the way that computers and information technology have changed so much about the American workplace.

Whatever the explanation for the productivity gains of the last decade, the above graph displays every indication that this welcome development is continuing. Most recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported productivity gains at a 3.2% annual rate for the first quarter and 2.2% annual rate for the second quarter of 2005.

How important is this?

There will always be some pessimists who think that productivity growth is a bad thing, reasoning that if one person can do the work of two, the unnecessary second worker will become unemployed. The record of history on that hypothesis is extremely clear, however. U.S. workers today produce more than three times as much per hour compared with their counterparts 50 years ago, and even so, the unemployment rate today is the same as it was in 1950. Instead of putting people out of work, what productivity growth has always meant in practice is a rising standard of living for everyone. No other statistic may be as important for determining long-run economic welfare as productivity.

But it still isn't front page news in most newspapers. Not just because bad news makes for better sales, but good growth argues against politics and ideology in general. How can a politician promise a scheme to improve the economy when the economy is running along just fine?

Recommended

Unbossed:

An editorial by the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank that advocates toll roads, says, "A new traffic signal that hastens traffic flow produces economic benefits. Similarly, one that hinders more than hastens, cause[s] economic damage."

Free-market think tanks also argue that toll roads benefit everyone because they reduce traffic on existing roads, causing traffic on existing roads to flow more efficiently.

It is therefore no small irony that local governments in Colorado have agreed to deliberately impede traffic on existing highways near a toll road in order to protect the toll roads' investors.

RTWT.

Earthquake!

Really.

Blogger Meeting

Today I skipped out on work and attended a blogger meeting sponsored by progressnow.org, organizing blog support for Referenda C & D. Met 'em dash' (I think - I only know an actual name) of Unbossed.com, a blog devoted to topical local grassroots action. Topic du jour is opposition to toll roads around the Front Range.

Addendum: It was noted that some blogs have no email address readily visible. Guilty as charged. Reach me at walter@walteri...

Fire Her

Picking up on Radley's article here, quoting chief drug war goon Karen Tandy:

Today's arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery's illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

She's clearly happy about going after legalization advocates - not just illegal drug traders, but treating political activists as criminals because of their opinions. Will Wilkinson says she should be fired, and he's right. Will:

And this means that, not joking, we ought to demand Karen Tandy's head. She's announced, straight out, that the United State government intends to use its ability to arrest people and put them in jail as a tactic for squelching political speech that conflicts with the government's policies. It should come as a surprise to no one that the thrust of the free speech clause of the First Amendment is to ensure that government reflects the free deliberative will of the governed. The freedom to agitate for the alteration of government is a minimal condition for the legitimacy of government. Karen Tandy has not only announced that she is violating the fundamental conditions for the moral legitimacy of the power that she wields, but that she is also proud of it. She has flouted her oath to the Constitution, has wantonly abused her power, is a disgrace as a public servant and a citizen, and must be removed from office.

Pass it on.

Do It Again, Practice Makes Perfect

You should go, too.

It's Contagious

Matt caught whatever it is going around the Denver bloggers the last couple years.