State decides to secure electronic voting machines – Los Angeles Times
It seems as if Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, is screaming “Damn it! We can be a greater laughing stock than Florida, and we ain’t gonna quite until we are!”
Political Economics
White House Budget Director Portman Resigns – washingtonpost.com
Sobering feedback based on the best available economic data was never welcome at the Bush White House according to the Treasury Secretaries (Paul O’Neill and John Snow) who have resigned after discovering that they were playing ceremonial roles in the Bush Cabinet. This latest resignation (article above) reaffirms the intense politicization of everything that is under way in the Bush Administration.
The funniest aspect, or the most vexing aspect depending on one’s point of view, is that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has consistently shown that the federal deficit 1) resulted from the Bush tax cuts and 2) the federal deficit will disappear as soon as the Bush tax cuts expire in both its July 2006 (pdf) economic forecast and its January 2007 (pdf) economic forecast. The summary, page IX, of the 2006 projection states quite flatly:
After 2010, it [the federal deficit] would decline sharply, reflecting the rapid increase in tax revenues that would occur after provisions initially enacted in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) expired. By 2016, the deficit would decline to 0.4 percent of GDP, according to CBO’s baseline projections.
Mindful of the fact that the CBO is, historically, the most nonpartisan and the most reliable economic forecasting institution, public or private, in the US, one can hardly refrain from rendering the most damning judgment against the Bush and Republican budgetary process, and this damning judgment is what this budgetary process merits.
But, perhaps the ultimate blame in all of this lies at the doors of voters who fail to realize that economics is a numbers game, and that numbers matter more in a numbers game than ideology.
The State of American Infrastructure
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Game Over | PBS
Robert Cringely is not a guy to be taken lightly. He has been the authoritative voice on technology issues for over a decade. He has literally written the history, and his predictions are the most reliable anywhere. It should be of concern to everyone when he declares the US’s communications infrastructure a lost cause, when compared with other industrial countries.
If you don’t believe Cringely when he says that America’s pathetic communications infrastructure is reducing business competitiveness, listen to UPS’s CEO, Michael Eskew, saying the same thing.
And, if you still have any doubts about how poor America’s infrastructure has become, listen to this fantastic nugget to find out how pathetic our infrastructure spending is, and which party keeps infrastructure spending so pathetic.
And, if these facts do not impress upon you the horrendous toll that the Iraq military campaign has exacted on the American economy, consult a psychiatrist or revisit elementary math.
Market Regulations Foster Profitability
GM back in black | | Guardian Unlimited Business
I have spent considerable time blasting American car makers, General Motors especially, for being such lousy stewards of one of the nation’s most important industries. Specifically, I wrote this post, and this one and this one in the aftermath of Big Three’s spectacular decline over the past five years.
When I saw this headline from The Guardian, I thought that I would have to eat my words, but then I started reading the article, and I happened upon this golden nugget.
GM, which made a loss of $3.4bn during the same period a year ago and came close to bankruptcy in 2005, is shedding more than 30,000 jobs in the US where it made an operating loss of $39m compared with one of $3.95bn a year earlier.
The company, which owns brands including Vauxhall, Chevrolet, Cadillac and Saab, is struggling to cope with fierce competition from Asian rivals in its core US market. But Carl-Peter Forster, GM Europe president, said it had made record sales and net profits ($236m) in Europe – the highest earnings since 1996.
And, there’s the rub. Just like Ford, General Motors is still losing money in the US, but making record profits in Europe. This begs the question as to whether capitalism is working in the United States. After all, the general consensus is that nearly all of the profitable companies on Wall Street make all of their profits from their offshore operations, not from their domestic operations.
And, this further begs the question regarding regulations. If General Motors and Ford are making record profits–indeed, the companies’ salvation comes from their European profits–in the most highly regulated marketplace on the planet, yet still recording losses in the least regulated marketplace in the industrial world, how can anyone argue that regulations are inherently bad for the marketplace?
Electronic Voting: Truthiness in Democracy
State: E-voting open to hacking – The Californian / North County Times
There is no shortage of evidence that electronic voting is totally unreliable. Nevertheless, two UC Santa Barbara computer scientists demonstrated yet again that electronic voting systems are easy to hack and to manipulate. In this instance, the Riverside County, California, electronic voting system was compromised by the researchers in many ways. This paragraph sums it all up:
A team of computer scientists hacked into the Edge II touch-screen systems used in Riverside and a dozen other counties, according to a report released Friday. The report laid out eight ways the system could be infected by rogue software capable of changing votes, including seven ways the team said it had successfully tested this summer on the actual Edge II systems manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems.
Conservative dogma and conservative ideology seek to counteract change, by definition, because not all change is good. It is baffling, then, why people who seek to change from paper voting to electronic voting despite the oceans of evidence that this is a horrible, unproductive and disastrous change insist on calling themselves “conservative”.
Change is part of nature, indeed, part of life. However, not all change is good. The greatest virtue of conservatism is in its opposition to changes that deteriorate the status quo, changes that erode moral values, that compromise human dignity and that reduce individual autonomy. The notions that pass for “conservatism” in the United States at the moment advocate the erosion of moral values, the destruction of human dignity and the elimination of individual autonomy. In as much as “conservative” support for faulty electronic voting schemes reflects the conservative moment in the United States, American “conservatism” is precisely the “liberal nightmare” that the movement is constantly lambasting and claiming to avoid.
Irony, it seems, is a word and emotion that still eludes the American lexicon and psyche.
To Nuke or not to Nuke?
Renewable energy could ‘rape’ nature – earth – 25 July 2007 – New Scientist Environment
The quest for a viable solution to the coming energy crisis takes countless unpredictable turns. Enter environmentalists for nuclear energy.
Yes, that most favorite of our energy sources received support, again, from purported environmentalists. The argument is entirely logical, too. It is the primary argument against the use of bio-ethanol as a source of fuel. Corn prices are already soaring as a result of the demand for ethanol made through corn fermentation, and there is already ample warning that the earth’s arable land area may not be sufficient to feed cars economically.
So, do we cover the entire land mass of the earth with solar cells and fuel crops, or do we use less space for nuclear power plants and risk periodic radioactive contamination? This is quite a dilemma.
For certain, we must abandon the fuel reprocessing plan that is currently being advocated by the US Department of Energy under the acronym GNEP, Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. It is not much of a partnership, and the only aspect of the program that is global in scope is its potential for global disaster.
The American “Ability” to Solve Problems
The Wasington Post | July 15, 2007 | by Steven Mufson | Climate Change Debate Hinges On Economics
The American government’s choice of large projects to fund is most baffling. The missile defense system, which is the recipient of countless billions of dollars annually, has been shown to be a technologically nearly impossible project to achieve and one with zero economic benefit based on principles alone. (Read all Google results.) Yet, as the article linked above demonstrates, environmental projects that are technologically feasible and that have huge economic benefits, are not funded.
There was a time when America was known as a pragmatic, practical country that created innovative solutions for large problems. The above reality paints a picture of a country that expends incalculable resources in order to come up with innovative means of creating large problems.
Nucular Nirvana: Reasons to Mistrust the US Government on Nuclear Energy
Chemical & Engineering News: Government & Policy – Reprocessing Key To Nuclear Plan (html, requires American Chemical Society membership)
Chemical & Engineering News, Vol. 85, No. 25, June 8, 2007 (pdf, no membership required)
What is GNEP? It stands for Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Should you care about it? You bet! GNEP is perhaps the most ill-advised of the many pathetically formulated energy policies put forth by the current White House. It is undoubtedly the most dangerous energy policy put forth by the White House.
GNEP is a program for the reprocessing of nuclear waste. This is a regime that Bush appointees of the Department of Energy are pushing adamantly. It is also a program that is staunchly opposed by proponents of nuclear energy from Jimmy Carter to the current leading government advisers.
It would be foolish to attempt to summarize or otherwise plagiarize this fine article by Jeff Johnson of Chemical & Engineering News, but it is worthwhile to whet the reader’s appetite to read to the article. This article is a must read. Here are a few highlights.
The DoE undersecretary pushing GNEP is named Clay Sell. Sell advocates “we do not need six new nuclear power plants in this country. We need 60, and the world needs 600. And, we need them all in a fairly short period of time.” It is difficult to tell whether Sell is doing what his name implies, or whether he is sounding a legitimate alarm. After all, 600 power plants will produce a huge amount of nuclear waste, and the US currently lacks sufficient storage for all this waste.
That is why Sell is advocating GNEP, a global regime for reprocessing spent fuel into more energetic, more radioactive, more dangerous and more toxic plutonium for future “breeder” plants. Thus, the program will (theoretically) reduce the amount of (more toxic) waste by using existing nuclear waste further for energy. This proposal sounds nice, until one reads the article further to realize that there are more than a few holes in this proposal.
First, the Yucca Mountain facility has sufficient capacity to store the nuclear waste being generated for years to come.
 …a study by the nuclear industry’s research arm, the Electric Power Research Institute… estimated [that] the area that includes Yucca Mountain is sufficient to store 260,000 to 570,000 tons of spent fuel–far more than the 63,000 metric-ton legal cap for commercial reactors and two to five times the amount that will be generated by the current operating U.S. power reactors.
Hence, the first premise is patently false. The other premises in Sell’s argument are also false.Breeder plants are not worthwhile or economical:
 As it turns out, breeder reactors could, by tapping the energy in U-238 [Uranium 238], produce more plutonium than was used to fuel the initial reactions. Now, fewer than a half-dozen reprocessing and demonstration breeder reactor facilities operate worldwide.
Reprocessing poses a huge national security risk. That’s why Jimmy Carter stopped it.
Carter’s concern was heightened following India’s detonation of a nuclear bomb in 1974. That bomb was made from plutonium that was reprocessed from an Indian civilian reactor provided by Canada with U.S. technical support.
Reprocessing is environmentally unsafe. (This point is perhaps obvious, but still worth making.)
 The countries [that have already reprocessed nuclear waste] have stockpiled the plutonium but are not close to building a system of reactors to recycle the plutonium or a permanent waste repository. Reprocessing for some of these countries, particularly the U.K., has also resulted in extensive radioactivity pollution problems.
And, the following are choice words from nuclear energy advocates.
 “GNEP is a waste of money,” said Richard Garwin, a nuclear physicist and frequent government adviser on nuclear issues…He urged the U.S. to continue on its current path of storing the waste on-site while developing a geological repository. This strategy is far cheaper as well as more proliferation-resistant than reprocessing, he added.
Garwin is joined by Ernest Moniz and John Deutch,Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors, nuclear power advocates, and authors of an influential report on nuclear power. They, too, oppose GNEP’s size and scope. Moniz warned that the U.S. has done far too little reprocessing research over the past 20-plus years to lay the groundwork for a commercial-scale facility. He noted as well that there is no uranium shortage to justify reprocessing and reusing spent fuel in the first place.
 …
Frank von Hippel, a physicist, former White ouse official, and international affairs professor at Princeton University…[says] “We need to focus on what we are doing now and do it better,” …”I’ve got no problem with nuclear power. The problem is a group of people have been bitten by the plutonium breeder reactor bug and want to keep the R&D money flowing. This is a wasteful program and a dangerous one with regard to weapons material proliferation.”
Suffice it to say that the above quotes represent a very small fraction of the shocking revelations in this article. So, please, read it!
The scientific, engineering and energy policy communities are in general agreement. The short term imperative is efficient use of fossil fuels with the gradual mixing in of electricity generated by solar, wind and other alternative sources. The long term imperative is an electric economy powered by a large variety of renewable sources.
One must wonder, therefore, why the current White House and Department of Energy insist on funding projects that are known to be energetic and economic duds, like fuel cells and nuclear reprocessing. It seems as if money is being wasted on useless research in order to keep oil scarce and valuable.
hmmmm…..
Shining Light on Dubious Theories
Temperature rises ‘not caused by sun’ | Climate change | Guardian Unlimited Environment
Anyone who has viewed and/or forwarded links to this controversial “documentary”, The Great Global Warming Swindle, must read the above Guardian article and forward it to all the people to whom they forwarded the original misleading documentary. Yet again, another argument against global warming force-fed to the public by biased sources has been proven wrong by raw data–not models, not hypotheses, and not theories. By raw data, which is to say, by reality.
The latest line of sophistry from the oil industry that was disseminated by the fraudulent British documentary went as follows: global warming is not caused by human activity, but by changes in solar activity. The sun is putting out more rays, the shysters claim, and that is why the earth is getting warmer. The shysters theorized this claim with the awareness that the general public lacks the technical wisdom and resourcefulness to know that this appealing theory can be tested with real data. The scientific community is not as naive.
Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK and Claus Frohlich of the World Radiation Centre in Davos, Switzerland, compared temperature and solar data for the past 100 years. Lockwood concluded
It is absolutely clear that the sun is nothing to do with the recent warming.This doesn’t rely on models, it uses real data and it shows that all the solar trends have been going in the opposite direction [toward less radiation and, hence, global cooling] for the last 20 years.Â
The two scientists conclude their upcoming communication (to be published by the Royal Society)
Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever mechanism is invoked.Â
Carl Wunsch, a professor at MIT, was duped into giving an interview to the makers of  Swindle, and he later called the movie propaganda. The film’s claims have been meticulously documented as false by many sites, including this one and this one. UK Channel 4, which aired the documentary, decided to distance itself from the production after discovering that the primary graph used by the program was fabricated by the right-wing agencies that funded the production. And now, we even know that the phenomenon proposed by the program never happened in reality. In fact, we now know that reality is diametrically opposed to the claims of the program. Will this be enough to kill this piece of propaganda?
Neoconservative Political Correctness Recognized by Court
Chemical & Engineering News, June 18, 2007
The final piece in the above linked pdf file is yet another instance of the Bush Administration’s failure to reclassify certain activities ostensibly in order to embellish or to hide its failure or to appease its supporters.
In this instance, the EPA had reclassified waste incinerators as less polluting devices. Thus, it had exempted them from stricter emission standards and, presumably, saved the companies that operate such incinerators considerable time and money. Fortunately, a panel of Federal judges overturned this reclassification.
The agency had argued that it could set less stringent controls for these incinerators by treating them as though they were “boilers” or “process heaters” that burn only fossil fuels. The court rejected that argument, stating that facilities that burn waste are incinerators and must meet the Clean Air Act’s strictest emissions standard. The panel denied petitions by EPA and industry groups for a rehearing, and sent the incinerator rule back for “wholesale revision.”
It is difficult to frame such a reclassification in anything other than politics. After all, the reason something that boils water is called a boiler and something that burns non-flammable organic materials at absurdly high temperatures is called an incinerator is that these are fundamentally different processes. If burning oil was the same as burning trash, then engineers would certainly not have gone through the trouble of re-engineering a new operation and Christening it with a different name.
Furthermore, the chemical signatures of these two devices are radically different because the boiler only uses hydrocarbons as fuel but the incinerator uses, well, anything. This is why they come under different emission rules.
This reclassification is as absurd as the reclassification of fast food jobs (such as assembling a burger at McDonald’s) as manufacturing jobs by the Economic Report of the President in 2004. It’s enough to make one want to shout “go reclassify yourself, pal”.