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n2doc's JournalPaul Krugman- Cutting Back on Carbon
Next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules designed to limit global warming. Although we don’t know the details yet, anti-environmental groups are already predicting vast costs and economic doom. Don’t believe them. Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy.
Just ask the United States Chamber of Commerce.
O.K., that’s not the message the Chamber of Commerce was trying to deliver in the report it put out Wednesday. It clearly meant to convey the impression that the E.P.A.’s new rules would wreak havoc. But if you focus on the report’s content rather than its rhetoric, you discover that despite the chamber’s best efforts to spin things — as I’ll explain later, the report almost surely overstates the real cost of climate protection — the numbers are remarkably small.
Specifically, the report considers a carbon-reduction program that’s probably considerably more ambitious than we’re actually going to see, and it concludes that between now and 2030 the program would cost $50.2 billion in constant dollars per year. That’s supposed to sound like a big deal. Instead, if you know anything about the U.S. economy, it sounds like Dr. Evil intoning “one million dollars.” These days, it’s just not a lot of money.
Remember, we have a $17 trillion economy right now, and it’s going to grow over time. So what the Chamber of Commerce is actually saying is that we can take dramatic steps on climate — steps that would transform international negotiations, setting the stage for global action — while reducing our incomes by only one-fifth of 1 percent. That’s cheap!
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/opinion/krugman-cutting-back-on-carbon.html?_r=0
Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong
Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice
by Daniel Ellsberg
John Kerry was in my mind Wednesday morning, and not because he had called me a patriot on NBC News. I was reading the lead story in the New York Times – "US Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of 2016" – with a photo of American soldiers looking for caves. I recalled not the Secretary of State but a 27-year-old Kerry, asking, as he testified to the Senate about the US troops who were still in Vietnam and were to remain for another two years: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
I wondered how a 70-year-old Kerry would relate to that question as he looked at that picture and that headline. And then there he was on MSNBC an hour later, thinking about me, too, during a round of interviews about Afghanistan that inevitably turned to Edward Snowden ahead of my fellow whistleblower’s own primetime interview that night:
On the Today show and CBS, Kerry complimented me again – and said Snowden "should man up and come back to the United States" to face charges. But John Kerry is wrong, because that's not the measure of patriotism when it comes to whistleblowing, for me or Snowden, who is facing the same criminal charges I did for exposing the Pentagon Papers.
As Snowden told Brian Williams on NBC later that night and Snowden's lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/daniel-ellsberg-snowden-fair-trial-kerry-espionage-act
Documents Show the VA Debacle Began Under George W. Bush
The Bush administration was aware of the backlogs and secret waiting lists but failed to fix the problem.
President Barack Obama and his administration have come under fire following a string of revelations about the huge backlogs of patients at Department of Veterans Affairs clinics and the underhanded tactics many of them used to hide the long wait times for medical care. As of Thursday evening, more than 100 lawmakers were calling on Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki to step down. But according to VA inspector general reports and other documents that have gone overlooked in the current firestorm, federal officials knew about the scheme at the heart of the scandal—falsifying VA records to cover up treatment delays—years before Obama became president. VA officials first learned of the problems in 2005, when George W. Bush was entering his second term, and the problems went unfixed for the duration of his presidency.
The underlying issues date back even further. In 1995, as part of a broader overhaul, the VA began pressing clinics to cut wait times for new patient appointments to 30 days. But there was no system for tracking which facilities were meeting this target until 2002, when the VA introduced electronic waiting lists to keep tabs on patients who couldn't be seen within a month. Managers who slashed wait times were given bonuses and other perks. This created an incentive to game the system, especially after veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars began flooding into VA clinics and straining their already stretched resources.
The efforts to mask delays burst into public view last month, when CNN reported that at least 40 patients—many of whom never made it onto electronic waiting lists—had died while awaiting care from the VA system in Phoenix.
more
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/veterans-affairs-backlogs-waiting-lists-george-bush
The House Science Committee Spent Thursday in a Climate Change Denial Echo Chamber
If one were to believe the same sorts of conspiracy theories that climate change deniers in Congress do, they'd find it fishy that the live stream of the Republican-controlled House Science Committee's circle jerk hearing about the follies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cut out—repeatedly and solely—when sane lawmakers were discussing their disgust with the proceedings.
Alas, the rational side of me thinks that there were probably just some technical difficulties.
The idea, in name, was to "examine the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Process," which is an underhanded way of giving a soapbox to climate change deniers on the panel and three witnesses who either deny humans have an impact on climate, think that the rapid warming we've seen is part of a natural cycle, or think that warming won't have an impact on humans and other living species.
The opposition leader of the committee, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tx.), who made her opening statements available on her website, making it possible to read what she said while the feed cut out, said as much: "While the topic of today's hearing is a legitimate one, namely, how the IPCC process can be improved, I am concerned that the real objective of this hearing is to try to undercut the IPCC and to cast doubt on the validity of climate change research."
more
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-house-science-committee-spent-all-day-proudly-denying-climate-change
11-Year-Old Deemed ‘Suspicous’ For Baggy Pants And Hoodie
Last year, the Miami Herald uncovered a Miami Gardens, Florida, police program that resulted in hundreds of seemingly suspicionless police stops against employees and customers at one convenience store. Employees were repeatedly charged with minor infractions such as trespassing over the objection of the store’s owner, in a “zero tolerance” program that gave police “broad powers to stop and arrest people who appear to be loitering or trespassing at the participating business,” according to the Herald.
Six months later, a Fusion investigation has revealed that the police department stopped 56,922 individuals who were never arrested between 2008 and 2013 — the equivalent of more than half the city’s population — in what was described by one public defender as “New York City stop-and-frisk on steroids.” Thousands of others were arrested after the stops.
Among those stopped without arrest was an 11-year-old black boy on his way to football practice. The police report dubbed him a “suspicious person,” noting only that they had “just cause” because he was “wearing gray sweatpants, a red hoodie and black gloves.”
In a review of more than 30,000 field contact reports, Fusion found that individuals were frequently stopped by different officers within minutes of each other. Individuals as old as 99 and as young as 5 were deemed “suspicious.” “Two officers from the MGPD told Fusion that high-ranking department officials gave them orders to “bring in the numbers” by conducting stops and arrests,” according to the report. “One officer said he was ordered to stop all black males between 15 and 30 years of age.” Another officer said records were falsified to meet quotas, and that some of those individuals were “still sitting in jail.”
more
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/05/30/3443069/in-florida-city-with-rampant-stop-and-frisks-11-year-old-boy-was-deemed-suspicous-for-baggy-pants-and-hoodie/
9/11 Museum Yanks Commemorative Cheese Platter After Outrage
The National September 11 Memorial Museum has pulled its controversial commemorative cheese platter from its shelves after an outcry at the museum’s opening.
The USA-shaped platter featured hearts over New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, where the planes crashed on 9/11. The item was first reported by Gothamist a week ago and was met with resounding criticism.
The museum opened last week to mixed reactions from the public, many of whom praised the actual museum while criticizing the gift shop and restaurant that were built on the land once known as “Ground Zero.”
Many likened it to having a gift shop at a cemetery, noting the many individuals who perished there.
more
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/911-museum-yanks-commemorative-cheese-platter-after-outrage/
Scientists Report Finding Reliable Way to Teleport Data
Scientists in the Netherlands have moved a step closer to overriding one of Albert Einstein’s most famous objections to the implications of quantum mechanics, which he described as “spooky action at a distance.”
In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology reported that they were able to reliably teleport information between two quantum bits separated by three meters, or about 10 feet.
Quantum teleportation is not the “Star Trek”-style movement of people or things; rather, it involves transferring so-called quantum information — in this case what is known as the spin state of an electron — from one place to another without moving the physical matter to which the information is attached.
Classical bits, the basic units of information in computing, can have only one of two values — either 0 or 1. But quantum bits, or qubits, can simultaneously describe many values. They hold out both the possibility of a new generation of faster computing systems and the ability to create completely secure communication networks.
Moreover, the scientists are now closer to definitively proving Einstein wrong in his early disbelief in the notion of entanglement, in which particles separated by light-years can still appear to remain connected, with the state of one particle instantaneously affecting the state of another.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/science/scientists-report-finding-reliable-way-to-teleport-data.html?_r=0
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