2011 - %3, January

Obama: Drug Legalization "Worth a Serious Debate"

| Fri Jan. 28, 2011 5:20 AM GMT




Here's Obama yesterday, in his own words: 

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Baby Wildlife: A BBC Top Ten

| Fri Jan. 28, 2011 5:01 AM GMT


For the next couple of months we're going to be reveling in all things living and new. So check out our ten favorite new life photos.

1) Giant Panda

Giant panda cubs aren't so big, and they only start walking after 75 days or so. In the meantime, their mothers occupy them by wrestling and rolling with them, cute!


Remembering the Holocaust's Roma (or Not)

| Fri Jan. 28, 2011 4:30 AM GMT

Here's a part of the Holocaust that rarely gets mentioned: "A staggering 95 percent of the Czech-born Romani and Sinti population perished in the war, most through extrajudicial killings." Or that up to a million and a half Gypsies (I'm allowed to call them that, without quotation marks, because my mom is Hungarian Roma) were exterminated during World War II. A chilling article by Brian Kenety at Czech Position (ceskapozice.cz/en) uses yesterday's anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—within which there was a special camp for Roma—as an occasion to give that tragedy its rare due. Though 70 percent (!) of Europe's Romani were killed in the war, no testimony was given by or about the group at Nuremberg.
Of course, the Roma continue to be persecuted across Europe, with everything from illegal deportations to assaults by skinheads. For its part, the Czech government is keeping up its end of insulting Gypsies by refusing to memorialize their 66-year-old slaughter. Rather than any sort of commemoration at the site of the biggest Czech concentration camp where Roma were held, there's...a pig farm.

"I think the fact that there is a pig farm is still run on the Lety site shows that, in general, the Roma are still considered to be second-class citizens," says European human rights activist Markus Pape. "Especially when you look at Lidice [the site of the massacre of in reprisal for the assassination of reprisal for the assassination of Nazi governor Reinhard Heydrich in 1942] and Terezín [the concentration camp known in German as Theresienstadt] and other places of Nazi persecution of the ethnic Czech or Jewish population in this country, it is not understandable…why the Roma victims don’t deserve similar recognition."

The whole article is well worth reading. Warning: some disburbing archival photos accompany it.

Obama's Sputnik Moment

| Fri Jan. 28, 2011 4:00 AM GMT

On Tuesday President Obama said we were entering "our generation's Sputnik moment":


This is only half right. It's true that after the launch of Sputnik science and math education became an American obsession, but that's not what got us to the moon. The scientists and engineers who eventually built the Apollo rockets weren't teenagers, after all. They were grown men and women who'd been educated in the 40s and 50s. The post-Sputnik push for better technical education may or may not have paid off—remember the New Math?—but if it did, it paid off two decades later in the personal computer revolution of the 80s.

So how did we unleash a "wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs"? Obama only touched on that in his speech, but part the answer is: big government. As Fred Kaplan reminds us, when Texas Instruments introduced a newfangled invention called the microchip in 1959, nobody in the private sector had any use for it:


The microchip would have found a market eventually even without NASA, but it might have taken years longer. And this same story goes beyond just integrated circuits. The first computer, ENIAC, was originally designed for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. The internet was originally funded by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency—which had been created in the wake of Sputnik—and was based on packet switching technology invented by a professor at a public university. And today, rocket technology itself, originally designed and funded by the federal government, is starting to become a thriving private business as well.

It was the private sector that turned these inventions into multi-billion dollar businesses, but it was government that provided either the basic research, the initial market, or both. Acknowledging this isn't an endorsement of socialism or tyranny or government run amok. It's an acknowledgment of the reality of progress in the modern era. Obama was right to focus our attention on education, technology, and infrastructure in his State of the Union address, because that's the seed corn that will provide long-term productivity growth for America and the world. But with apologies to Bill Clinton, if we're really serious about out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building, this means accepting that the era of big government is far from over. When it comes to basic R&D and the infrastructure to exploit it, it's only just begun.

Front page image credit: NASA Images.

Kochs Attempt to Unmask Climate Pranksters

| Fri Jan. 28, 2011 4:00 AM GMT

A few weeks ago, I reported that Koch Industries didn't take too kindly to the anonymous pranksters who spoofed their position on climate change last month with a fake website and press release. The Kochs argued that the fake site that claimed the company had changed its tune on global warming was bad for the bottom line of Koch Industries. Koch has filed suit, accusing the spoofers of "trademark infringement, cybersquatting, and unfair competition." And, in order to do so, Koch wants the names of the folks behind the prank revealed.

But the anonymous defendants in the case—who are calling themselves "Youth for Climate Truth"—now have representation from an attorney, Deepak Gupta of the public interest group Public Citizen. This week, Gupta asked the judge in the US federal district court in Utah to dismiss the case outright. Public Citizen is also asking the court to quash the subpoena issued to the web hosting company that sought to force it to cough up the names of the pranksters and issue a directive to Koch's lawyers barring them from releasing any information about the defendants that they may have already obtained.

The Koch suit also seeks to purse the pranksters for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal offense that is intended to deal with hacking. This one, the defendants' lawyer says, should be a real stretch of the law, since there was no hacking involved in the spoof; it was only a parody of the Koch website and a fake press release.

Revealing the identities of the anonymous people behind the prank and punishing them for it would have a "chilling effect on free speech," Public Citizen argues. "The First Amendment protects anonymous speech and speech on the internet," Gupta tells Mother Jones. Moreover, there is no evidence that the spoof site caused any financial harm to Koch, nor did anyone take the prank seriously, Gupta argues. (See the defendants' filing here.)

This case is pretty similar to the one that the US Chamber of Commerce filed against the Yes Men in 2009 after the pair of notorious pranksters made a mockery of their climate stance as well. There hasn't been any resolution in that case so far.


Fri Jan. 28, 2011 3:30 AM GMT


Advertise on MotherJones.com

Memo to FCIC: More Transparency, Please

| Thu Jan. 27, 2011 4:00 PM GMT














The Spudnut Moment

| Thu Jan. 27, 2011 3:08 PM GMT

My sister thinks I should join the movement to declare February a Palin-free month. The logic behind this is unassailable. And yet....it would prevent me from sharing stuff like this:

The first segment is some sort of painfully rehearsed word salad about Obama's mention of a Sputnik moment in his State of the Union address, and it ends with Palin suggesting that what America really needs is a “Spudnut moment,” referring to a small business in Richland, Washington. Tommy Christopher tries to make sense of it all:

Palin never really explains how this is supposed to work, but I think the equation goes something like this: “Sputnik moment” + “Something that sounds like Sputnik but isn’t”=WIN!

For what it's worth, Greta Van Susteren's blank look at the end of Palin's harangue is sort of priceless. Still, it leaves the question open: are we better off taking a month's vacation from this? Or is the entertainment value just too high? Decisions, decisions.....

US Teachers Don't Teach Evolution

| Thu Jan. 27, 2011 3:02 PM GMT

From tomorrow's issue of Science, a new paper describing the great divide between creationism's court losses (every major US federal court case in the past 40 years) and a paradoxical decline in classroom teaching of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself.

Based on data from the National Survey of High School Biology teachers, the authors estimate that only 28% of all biology teachers consistently teach evolutionary biology, while 13% explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design. The remaining teachers they deem the cautious 60%:

The cautious 60% may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists. The strategies of emphasizing microevolution, justifying the curriculum on the basis of state-wide tests, or "teaching the controversy" all undermine the legitimacy of findings that are well established by the combination of peer review and replication. These teachers fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments, even if unintentionally.

The authors note that more high school students take general biology than any other science course, and that biology will be the only high school science class for up to a quarter of all US graduates. Yet 72% will get no schooling in evolutionary biology or a wobbly version of it: "absent, cursory, or fraught with misinformation."

The authors suggest that scientists and scientific organizations address the problem:

  • By continuing participation in federal law suits, since federal courts effectively limit the ability of state and local governments to endorse nonscientific alternatives to evolution
  • By requiring evolution courses be taught to teachers in training, since those who teach evolutionary biology are more likely to have completed a course in evolution (and feel more confident teaching it) than those who don't teach it at all, or who teach it ambivalently:

They add:


The paper:

  • Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer. Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom. 2011. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1198902

Palin on Obama's "Hostility" to Oil

| Thu Jan. 27, 2011 1:37 PM GMT


