“free trade”

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Techdirt on the US’s interpretation of free trade and what it’s doing to poorer countries:

the US is using free trade agreements around the world to force US-style intellectual property rules on the rest of the world — often at tremendous harm to those countries. It’s doubly ironic when you realize that intellectual property rules are the exact opposite of free markets. They’re government-backed monopolies that benefit the monopolists, generally at the expense of everyone else. The New Yorker piece does a good job highlighting Josh Lerner’s research that strengthening patent laws has no impact on increased innovation, and there’s almost no connection whatsoever between copyright law and creative output. In other words, the exact reason for the laws (to put in place incentives for innovation and more creative content) aren’t supported at all by history.

Go to the actual post to read about how this is impacting the third world. Our greed is disgusting.

shopping list

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I need a new shower curtain. My current curtain came with the apartment. It is a very dark green and is made of a material very like saran wrap. So every morning I struggle in the dark to keep cold air out of my bath without suffocating myself in my exceptionally clingy shower curtain. And just when I think I have it tamed, it leaps from the side of the tub to wrap around my legs.

As I’m drying my hair and wiping off the slime from the shower curtain, I fantasize about a tough plastic curtain, clear, with the little weights at the bottom.

Sam Brownback doesn’t believe in evolution

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Angry Astronomer has a good critique of Sam Brownback’s op-ed piece on evolution in the NY Times. If you didn’t watch the Republican presidential debates, Brownback is one of the three who said they did not believe in evolution. From the critique:

He [Brownback] states, “we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two.”

That’s a cute, rosy little picture. Too bad it’s quite divorced from reality. While the two need not be completely at odds, it’s inevitable that one of the two will occasionally get things wrong, and upon discovery, can and should be expected to yield. With the matter of evolution, it is well supported. Yet the faithful refuse to yield.

Things like evolution and climate change don’t really care whether or not you believe in them.

my life until August

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Between class, working in the lab, working at the help desk, working at the gerontology institute, and maybe doing my homework, I’m going to be gone from 7 to 9 every day of the week starting Monday. So if you don’t hear from me very often, don’t worry: I am still alive and I am not mad at you.

fear and manipulation

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Dave Neiwert at Orincus writes about the policies, ideals, and history of the right and our abused soldiers. Lets hope that our politicians treat our veterans with the care and respect they deserve – including counseling, good medical care, and helping them rejoin society.

The far right, by appealing to people’s baser instincts and especially their fears, has a long history of encouraging working-class people to reject progressive values on purely visceral cultural grounds.

So far this century, we’ve seen a real growth of far-right rhetoric, and the march of its agenda, manifesting itself in such shapes as the Minutemen — who are in fact almost direct descendants of the ’90s militias — and various cultural eugenicists posing as “immigration reformers” and twisting the national debate on immigration in truly perverse directions; Christian “Dominionists” who want to turn the United States into a theocratic state; and most of all, a real culture of totalism fueled by an increasingly ugly tide of eliminationist rhetoric.

The incidents of domestic terrorism coming from the far right have meantime been bubbling along at a low level, present like background noise that everyone pretends not to notice: the anthrax killer, William Krar, one abortion clinic bomber arrested mid-plot, while another was caught after his bomb misfired.

the extreme stresses under which we are now placing these soldiers [our soldiers in Iraq], especially in the form of multiple tours and forced reenlistment, is eventually going to produce a bumper crop of damaged citizens, some of whom are going to be extremely vulnerable to the “stab in the back” meme that’s become a major note in the right-wing drumbeat on the war.

It’s definitely worth reading the whole thing.

the future of coal

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Gregory Boyce is skeptical of global climate change and has big plans for coal.

Despite the fact that coal is known to be one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases, Boyce, 52, is banking on a future in which America burns a lot more of it. With the country’s huge reserves, he argues, coal should be doing much more than its traditional tasks of making electricity or steel. “We’re moving into an era where we’ll be driving our vehicles based on coal-derived fuel. We’re going to be flying on it,” Boyce declares.

It would be great to dismiss that as the ravings of a madman, but if we don’t start making better choices about the way we live and invest more in green technology, he could be right.

even in our iPod age, coal still sits at the heart of the economy. The Energy Dept. predicts overall electricity demand will grow by 45% between now and 2030. It also forecasts that coal-fired plants, today 51% of the market, will grow to 57% over the same period. Coal is cheap and plentiful. And there aren’t a lot of easy alternatives for replacing it anytime soon. Just to maintain nuclear power’s 20% of the U.S. energy market, 35 to 40 new plants will have to built in the next 20 years. Renewable sources such as hydropower, wind, and biofuels face similar challenges scaling up to meet market demand.

not necessarily healthier

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Majikthise points to an interesting article about the probably not-so-good health of baby boomers. Unlike most articles that discuss obesity, this one doesn’t blame people for being fat – it looks at the lifestyle choices left open to them because of income.

“A lot of what we visualize about the baby boomers are the people who went to college — the highly educated group that gets all the attention. They’re the cultural icon,” said David R. Weir, an economist at the University of Michigan, noting that studies have shown that better-educated people tend to have more healthful lifestyles and better access to health care. “But not everyone went to college, and not everyone is engaging in these healthful activities.”

Majikthise summarized it like this:

We may be seeing long-term fallout from years of heightened economic insecurity and social isolation, coupled with increasingly sedentary lifestyles and less physically demanding work–and the least well off are probably going to be the hardest hit.

Not the most encouraging news. This could be a problem for our healthcare system. On the other hand, people could just be whinier:

It is unclear whether boomers are really sicker or are simply more health-conscious by dint of being better educated and having better access to information. They may also have higher expectations, making them more likely to notice and complain about aches and pains that earlier generations would have accepted as just part of getting older.