The Death of Anwar al Awlaki

American-born jihadist Anwar al Awlaki was assassinated in Yemen today. So far as WC knows, it is the first assassination of an American by the United States in American history. It’s a troubling precedent to any thoughtful citizen.

WC is deeply ambivalent about the Obama administration’s ongoing war on terror. But WC cannot quarrel with it’s success rate. While the Neocons and Teabaggers try to paint President Obama as feckless, his record is astonishing. Andrew Sullivan nails it, as usual.

Compare the two presidents. One unleashed a war in Afghanistan he then left to languish, and sparked an unjustified war in Iraq, that became a catastrophe of mass death and chaos. He both maximally antagonized the Arab and Muslim world and didn’t even score a major victory against the enemy. In many ways, Bush gave al Qaeda an opening in Iraq where it never had one before, and allowed its key leadership to escape at Tora Bora. The torture program, meanwhile, fouled up our intelligence while destroying our moral standing in the world.

Obama has ended torture and pursued a real war, not an ideological spectacle. He has destroyed almost all of al Qaeda of 9/11 (if Zawahiri is taken out, no one is left), obliterated its ranks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, found and killed bin Laden, in a daring raid pushed relentlessly by the president alone, capturing alongside a trove of intelligence, procured as a consequence of courage and tenacity rather than cowardice and torture.

The 2012 presidential election will be about the economy, not foreign relations, but it is indisputable that Obama has succeeded where Bush failed.

Birds: The Same, But Different

One of the challenges of birding is the regional differences in bird species. The species are the same, but regional variability in coloration and markings sometimes make the birds appear quite different.

WC was wandering around in central Idaho recently, and found three species that show enough variation from the familiar Alaska varieties that they make a northern birder do a double take.

Alaska’s migratory woodpecker, the Northern Flicker, is the “Yellow-shafted” variation. In Idaho, it’s the “Red-shafted” race, which looks quite different:

Red-shafted Northern Flicker

A very handsome bird, but dramatically different from what WC is used to seeing.

Similarly, the Yellow-rumped Warbler, by far Interior Alaska’s most common warbler, in Alaska is the “Myrtle Warbler,” which has a white throat. In Idaho, it’s the “Audubon’s Warbler,” again a very different looking bird:

Yellow-rumped "Audubon's" Warbler

A final example is more subtle. The Savannah Sparrow is a fairly common sparrow around fields in Interior Alaska. Not only does it call out its own name (sah-sah-sah-van-ah); it has a pale breast and a strong yellow eyebrow. By contrast, the subspecies in the Rocky Mountains is much streakier and, at least outside of breeding season, the yellow eyebrow is faint:

Savannah Sparrow

In WC’s circle of birding buddies, there’s some debate over whether this might be a first year bird, but either way, it’s certainly a different looking version of the same species.

All of which makes birding that much more challenging and that much more fun.

WC’s on Break

After about 90 consecutive days of new posts, WC is going to take a few days off from the blog and see if there are any birds left to photograph.

Well and Good

Feel free to discuss among yourselves… WC’ll be back in a while.

(By the way, in response to comments and questions, yes, that’s an un-retouched photo taken in Fairbanks.)

Photogenic Rats

WC was in Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains recently. On top of the stump of a Ponderosa Pine was this little fellow:

Bushy-tailed Woodrat #1

At first there was some confusion about what we had found. It sort of resembled a Pika, but the ears were wrong. And a Pika, sometimes called a Rock Rabbit, would be unlikely on top of a tree stump.

Bushy-tailed Woodrat Profile

The snout was the give away. This is a rodent, not a cousin to a rabbit. The extravagant whiskers – three times the width of the head – looked like a rodent, too.

Bushy-tailed Woodrat #3

Now WC may be a birder, but his identification skills for mammals, and especially small mammals, are sharply limited. WC was doubly handicapped because the animal’s tail was never visible.

So the initial guess of Pika was wrong, but with help from the Web, it was positively identified as a Bushy-tailed Wood Rat. A life mammal for WC. And not believed to be found in Alaska, although it reportedly breeds as far north as the southeastern Yukon Territory.

This is apparently one of the kinds of woodrats that gave rise to the term “packrat.” A mammal that uses its own urine to glue parts of its nest together isn’t on WC’s short list of favorite animals, but for a rat, it’s pretty cute.

Playing with Harpers’ Index

For those who haven’t yet discovered it and share WC’s somewhat magpie sensibility, Harper’s Index is one of the treasure troves of miscellaneous sourced facts on the Web. Type your subject in the box, press return and a list of points appears; hover over them and you have the source. The items are in chronological order; the most recent are at the bottom of the list.

For example, if you type in “baseball” you get this gem:

Number of words devoted to the Depression in Houghton Mifflin’s fifth-grade history book, Build Our Nation: 332

Number devoted to the baseball career of Cal Ripken Jr.: 339

Or these nuggets:

Number of U.S. patents that have been issued for corporate tax-avoidance strategies: 32

Head of cattle that Fidelity Investments keeps on a portion of its corporate campus near Fort Worth: 25
Amount in taxes it thereby saves each year through a Texas “agricultural” exemption: $328,000

All of which is why WC read Jason Peters’ blog post, Pining for the Fleshpots of Reagan with interest, because it purports to be composed of tidbits from the Harper’s Index. And while Mr. Peters’ bullet points are pithy and plausible, and possibly even true, WC cannot find many of them in Harper’s Index himself. And where he can, they are badly dated. The final bullet, that 20% of Americans are obese, is actually from a 1987 story in Harper’s. Current data are probably worse.

The stories in the Harper’s Index, for whatever reason, are difficult to reconcile. Remember the one in five story from 1987? In 1990 the magazine reported that there were no states in which more than 14% of the adults were clinically obese; by 2005 more than 14% of adults were clinically obese in 50 states.

So while it’s fun to poke around in, the stories, especially the older stories, may not be entirely reliable.

Smart, Articulate and Progressive

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What can’t Alaska produce and candidate like this? WC would vote for an Elizabeth Warren.

What Americans Say They Want

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Teabaggers, of course, and specifically their U.S. House drones, are adamantly opposed to any “tax increases.” Poor Rep. John Fleming (R. La) told MSNBC that after feeding his family, he only had “about $400,000 a year” left as income. Which may tell you everything you need to know about where the Congressional teabaggers are coming from.

Both WC and WC’s readers are rightfully suspicious about any individual poll. At best, they represent a flawed view of a limited sample at a specific point in time. But on the question of increasing taxes, there are enough polls, over a long enough period of time, that WC is pretty confident the data accurately reflect reality. This table is from Bruce Bartlett’s Capital Gains and Capital Games blog:

Can/Should the Budget Deficit Be Reduced with Spending Cuts Alone or Should There Be Some Increase in Taxes?
Poll	Date	Some/All Taxes	No Taxes/ All Spending
New York Times/CBS News	9-16-11	74	21
Bloomberg	9-14-11	48	38
Associated Press	8-26-11	69	29
Gallup	8-10-11	66	33
CNN	8-10-11	63	36
McClatchy/Marist	8-9-11	68	29
New York Times/CBS News	8-4-11	63	34
CNN	8-2-11	60	40
Ipsos/Reuters	7-26-11	68	19
Rasmussen	7-25-11	56	34
CNN	7-21-11	64	34
Washington Post/ABC News	7-19-11	66	32
NBC News/Wall Street Journal	7-19-11	62	27
CBS News	7-18-11	69	28
Quinnipiac	7-14-11	67	25
Gallup	7-13-11	73	20
Washington Post/ABC News	6-9-11	61	37
Ipsos/Reuters	6-9-11	59	26
Bloomberg	5-13-11	64	33
Ipsos/Reuters	5-12-11	61	27
Gallup	4-29-11	76	20
USC/Los Angeles Times	4-25-11	62	33
New York Times/CBS News	4-22-11	66	19
Washington Post/ABC News	4-20-11	62	36
Washington Post/ABC News	3-15-11	67	31
Washington Post/ABC News	12-12-10	62	36
Associated Press/CNBC	11-26-10	65	33
Average		64.5	30

So with this kind of evidence of public support, how is that the U.S. House cannot muster a fiscally responsible jobs-creation bill? Two thirds of Americans want to include tax increases as a tool to address the federal deficit. Even if poor, pitiful Rep. Fleming has to make do with a little less than $400,000 “after feeding his family.”

We all are going to have to suffer a bit to fix the problems Rep. President Bush created. For a given definition of “suffer” at least.

Photographing Wood Ducks

No one agrees on which North American duck species is the handsomest, but there’s no disagreement on which one is the most extravagant: the Wood Duck drake. It’s also famously difficult to photograph. While the species isn’t found in Alaska, WC had yet another opportunity to try to photograph Wood Ducks recently. Here’s an illustration of the challenges:

Wood Duck Drake © 2011 Frozen Feather Images

The black patches in the neck are pure black; the white belly, butt neck and accent lines are pure white. Getting detail in the blacks without “blowing” – overexposing – the whites is nearly impossible. The whites are blown here and there’s still no detail in the blacks. See what WC means?

In this second shot, WC has lowered the exposure compensation by a full point. There’s a lot more detail in the whites, and the subtle patterning in the light browns is better, but there’s no detail at all in the blacks:

Wood Duck Drake #2 © 2011 Frozen Feather Images

If the photographer tries to get detail in the blacks, he has to be prepared to have a blank white, blown-out belly and neck.

The hen, a pretty bird but much less extravagant, is much easier to photograph:

Wood Duck Hen © 2011 Frozen Feather Images

But photographing the hen is a bit of a cop-out. It’s the drake that presents the challenge. WC hasn’t gotten it right yet, but will persevere.

The Tragedy of the Antibiotic Commons

WC is old enough to remember the pre-antibiotic days. One of WC’s cousins had poliomyelitis, and still struggles with the consequences of the disease. WC’s brother contracted tuberculosis in the 1950s. But by the time WC was a teenager, most infectious bacterial diseases were treatable. Bacterial disease had been “conquered.”

But evolution – that “theory” that Neocons doubt – is too powerful to be stopped by a little thing like antibiotics. Many once-treatable diseases have evolved immunity to most, if not all, antibiotics. We may be rapidly moving to a world in which infectious disease is again a terror.

To understand how this has happened, we have to first visit the Tragedy of the Commons:

[Consider] a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin’s example, it is in each herder’s interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is damaged for all as a result, through overgrazing. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all.

Megan Mcardle, writing in Atlantic Magazine, documents the application of the Tragedy of the Commons to antibiotics. She documents how the patent system, the gross overuse of too many existing antibiotics, the prohibitive cost of developing new drugs and acquired resistance all conspire to create a new dark age of disease:

Antibiotics are an exhaustible resource. We should be treating them like an oil field, or an endangered species. Instead, we handle them like consumer electronics. The patent system is designed to promote human invention, not conserve what has already been discovered. Patents are limited to 20 years, so that other inventors can build on earlier innovations. Arthur Daemmrich, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the pharmaceutical industry, points out that the pharmaceutical patent life is actually much shorter, because the patent clock begins running before the start of multi-year clinical trials necessary to get the drug approved. And when companies finally get to market, they face the risk that a competitor will be close behind with a related drug. As Laxminarayan says, “The pharma companies don’t have an incentive to conserve the effectiveness of their antibiotics. They have [intellectual-property] rights on a drug, but someone else could be developing a similar molecule that will create resistance to my molecule, so I need to sell it as fast as I can.”

Farmers have a strong incentive to overuse antibiotics: it leads to healthier animals, which gets them more money. But the overuse speeds the creation of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. If new antibiotics are developed, it’s in society’s interest they be used as little as possible, to preserve their effectiveness as long as possible. But then there is no financial incentive for new drugs to be developed.

And because bacteria are no respecter of national boundaries, this is an international problem; the “Commons” for this tragedy is the entire planet. While Congress is playing power games, real issues like this lay neglected. Our children will not thank us.

Life Imitating Art / Art Imitating Life

WC, as many readers known, is an enthusiastic fan of the writing of Sir Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld series is among the best satiric literature of recent decades. Part of Pratchett’s charm is that some of his characters appear in multiple stories, but across those stories they evolve, age, grow and change. And Pratchett has killed off characters; always for a purpose.

Ghengiz Cohen, a/k/a Cohen the Barbarian

One such recurring character is Ghengiz Cohen, a/k/a Cohen the Barbarian, the nonagenarian barbarian hero. Cohen, originally a quick satiric knock-off of Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, first appeared in The Light Fantastic, the second Discworld novel, and has over the course of half a dozen stories, evolved into a more complex, more interesting character.

In one of the rare Discworld short stories, Troll Bridge, Cohen bemoans the civilizing of the world, the way rules and civilization have displaced the wild old days. Cohen is the first to admit he has been a lifetime in his legend, and it has been a very long lifetime.

By the time of the events of The Last Hero, Cohen has nothing left to accomplish except revenge, specifically revenge on the gods for making a world in which he no longer has a place. He intends to return fire to the gods, with interest, in the form of a large bomb. Cohen the Barbarian has very nearly become a terrorist.

Ghengis Cohen Restaurant

But life imitates art as often as art imitates life. WC was surprised to learn that there is a pretty well known restaurant named Ghengis Cohen in West Hollywood, California. The restaurant has been around nearly as long as Pratchett’s character. Pratchett’s aging barbarian appeared in 1985; the restaurant about the same time.

It’s unclear to WC if art or life came first. But it’s the kind of delightful  discovery that can brighten a rainy weekday. If you haven’t read Pratchett, you’re missing a treat. WC recommends one of the recent novels, perhaps Going Postal, as a starting point. You may even find your own delightful coincidences.

Serious Wonkery: Krugman’s Speech on Macroeconomics

Several readers have accused WC of wonkish tendencies. It’s absolutely true. Which is why WC begins this post with a

Serious Wonkery Warning

before venturing into the fogs of macroeconomics.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, New York Times columnist and unapologetic Keynsian, recently gave an address at Princeton University. It asks the very serious question, why haven’t economists done a better job of foreseeing, understanding and addressing the Great Recession. His conclusion:

In short, in responding to the crisis, the profession presented a sorry spectacle of unnecessary ignorance that didn’t even recognize itself as ignorance, of bitter debate over issues that were resolved many decades earlier. And all of this, of course, made the profession mostly useless at a time when it could and should have been of great service. Put it this way: we would have responded better to this crisis if macroeconomics had been frozen at the level of knowledge it had in 1948, when Paul Samuelson published the first edition of his famous textbook. And the result has been to leave actual policy discussion without any discipline from the people who should be shaping that discussion: politicians and officials have been free to follow their prejudices and intuitions, never mind the lessons of history and analysis. Economists have failed to fulfill their social function.

He paints a very bleak picture of the future:

I’m sorry if I have painted a bleak picture of the role of economists in the crisis. Unfortunately, that’s the way it looks to me. So what can be done to improve that picture?

Some economists are pushing forward with new macroeconomic models that incorporate the lessons of the crisis. Me too! And by all means, let’s do that. But as I’ve said, our big problem was not lack of models.

There are also many calls for new economic thinking; there’s even an institute dedicated to that project. Again, fine — but the biggest problem we had as a profession wasn’t failure to keep up with a changing world, it was failure to remember what our fathers learned.

What we really need is a change in the destructive social dynamics that brought us to this point. And I wish I knew how to do that. But my problem is obvious: I’m an economist, and it seems that we need some kind of sociologist to solve our profession’s problems.

What WC understands Prof. Krugman to be saying is that economics does know what needs to be done to pull the country out of this ongoing recession. The government needs to spend several times as much money as it has to create jobs to bust the cycle. But that in the present political climate – “destructive social dynamics” – where the Teabaggers have been permitted to define government debt as original sin or worse, it’s not going to be happen.

Which means we refuse to learn the lessons of history. So we are doomed to repeat it.

American Crows Recognize Human Faces

WC has a sourdough buddy in Fairbanks who used to band ravens. He said you had to get close to them, usually baiting them with french fries,  and then throw a net to trap them. But the interesting thing was that he said he couldn’t use the same pickup twice, couldn’t wear the same clothes and had to wear a face mask. WC put it all down to sourdough stories for the credulous; ravens are smart, but recognizing people?

WC’s mistake. A recent study shows that American Crows – the smaller cousins of Common Ravens – not only recognize human faces, but can teach other crows to watch out for certain people.

 Not only do crows scold dangerous people, but they include family members — and even strangers — into their mob. The hostile behaviour of crows within mobs allows naïve birds to indirectly learn about a dangerous person, and to also learn to associate that individual’s face with danger and react accordingly.

In a careful study, they demonstrated crows can teach other crows, a behavior formerly thought to only occur in primates.

The researchers found that within the first two weeks after trapping, an average of 26 percent of crows encountered scolded the person wearing the dangerous trapping mask. But over a five-year period after the trapping event, the dangerous trapping mask received an increasingly hostile response from birds in the area, suggesting that the captured birds had warned others. Further, the number of crows reacting to the dangerous trapping mask increased steadily over time to include naïve birds, whereas the number of crows scolding the neutral mask during this same time period remained unchanged.

This is alarming. The study suggests at least some crows are smarter than some of WC’s friends. One buddy, as an example, can’t seem to remember that the black sedan is an unmarked Fairbanks City Police car. And don’t get WC started on the implications for folks like The Quitter. Or the folks who would vote for The Quitter.

But the main thing is that once again science has demonstrated humankind is a little less exceptional than we’d like to think.

k d lang: Simply Outstanding

k d lang

Wow.

k d lang and her band, the Siss Boom Bang, came to Hering Auditorium Thursday night as the opening act of  Fairbanks Concert Association’s 2011-2012 season. lang blew the doors off the auditorium, and probably damaged the roof. She was simply that good.

It wasn’t a matter of mere decibels, although lang’s recent turn to a more rock-oriented music certainly offers decibels. No, it’s about lang’s voice, which is simply extraordinary. To quote the staid London Times, “Her gorgeous voice is a versatile weapon of mass seduction.” Her cover of Leonard Cohen‘s “Hallelujah” brought a spontaneous standing ovation from the usually sedate FCA crowd. That’s not the first time, of course; lang’s performance of the song at the 2005 Juno Awards brought the audience to its feet for a two minute long standing ovation, too. And she performed it for the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics, to an audience of millions. But seeing her live takes it to a whole new level. WC has attended hundreds of concerts, and lang’s performance of “Hallelujah” ranks in the top ten songs WC has heard live.

WC understands that lang is controversial in some circles for her forcefully held views, androgynous looks, style and strong personality. But that has nothing to do with her superb music. lang addressed it briefly at the concert, with a sly reference to “freaks.” But it has nothing at all to do with her music. Which is simply outstanding. Or her sultry, earthy voice, which is mesmerizing.

In addition to an astonishing voice and vocal style, lang is also an amazing show person. She dominates that stage. Even during instrument solos by her fine band, it was hard to not watch lang.  It’s not just a matter of charisma, although lang has buckets of charisma. It’s a matter of stage presence.

All of lang’s songs were good, but there were a few others that were nearly as good as “Hallelujah.” In partciular, the last song of the set, “Constant Craving,” was breathtaking. The band is very, very good; they were tight, flexible – moving among instruments throughout the show – and energetic. Special props to the drummer, Fred Eltringham, late of The Wallflowers, for outstanding work throughout.

lang has ten albums, four Grammys, numerous Junos (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy) and many other honors. But she is one of those rare artists who records amazing albums, but who is even better live. Sure, it was a little disappointing that she didn’t perform Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” another breath-taking, show-stopping number, but the artist picks the set list, not the crowd, and lang’s selections were excellent.

Folks who missed this show should be kicking themselves. If you won’t take WC’s word for it, download one of the live versions of lang’s “Hallelujah” and see what the excitement is about. An amazing artist, a terrific band and a truly memorable concert.

Special thanks to Ann Biberman and the Board of FCA for breaking out a little bit and taking what some might see as a risk on an artist like k d lang. Well done.

Teabaggery: Just Let ‘Em Die

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In Andrew Sullivan’s apt phrase, “The fish rotted from the head down. Last night, we got a whiff of the smell.” As a matter of raw statistics, at least 13 out of every 100 Teabaggers cheering the death of the hypothetical young man who didn’t have health insurance do not themselves have health insurance. And the 13% rate was in 2008; subsequent unemployment increases will surely have raised that number. The Teabagger crowd lacks the introspection of a rabid skunk or is deluding themselves that they are immune to all disease and accident. It makes WC embarrassed to be an American.

But going beyond the Libertarian clap-trap, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) was adopted in 1986 to address the problem of “patient dumping.” Simply put, any hospital accepting federal funds (excluding VA, IHS and Shriners’ Children’s Hospitals) are not permitted to turn away emergency patients, regardless of their ability or inability to pay. The hypothetical posed to Dr. Paul can’t happen.

Of course, that emergency room care comes at a price. And since the patient cannot pay, we all get to pay. Hospitals – even nonprofit hospitals – have to make money, so the cost of treating EMTALA patients gets passed along to those of us who do have health care coverage, in the form of higher rates. TANSTAAFL and all that. A great many emergency rooms visits are the result of a failure to obtain basic or preventative care. So in addition to increasing everyone else’s health care expenses by being uninsured, those ER patients often have avoidable emergency conditions.

In a very real sense, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – the much-derided “Obamacare” – is simply a recognition of the insanity of current practices. Instead of dealing with health care at the ER door, instead of waiting until it is a crisis and treatment is more expensive, deal with it earlier.

And those cheering Teabaggers: It’s easy to talk the talk; let’s see the Teabaggers walk to the walk. WC suggests that if the Teabaggers really want a health emergency to mean death for the uninsured, then seek repeal of EMTALA. By all means, let’s go back to the ambulances driving from hospital to hospital, looking for someone to help a critically ill victim. Pile ‘em up outside the ER door to live or die. That’s civilized. You betcha.

Alaskans for Limited Government: Hello? This Is Reality Talking

In a blog post titled “Proposition 2: A Classic Case for Limited Government, a blogger named Pete Alexion writing for an organization called Alaskans for Limited Government calls supporters of Fairbanks North Star Borough Proposition #2 “advocates of unlimited government.” But to understand the illogic of this claim, WC’s readers need some background.

Fairbanks sits in a bowl, with the north, east and west sides closed in by the foothills of the White Mountains. Combined with the air inversions we get here, where lenses of warmer air sit on top of colder, lower air, and you have a natural trap for polluted air. Fairbanks has a long history of horribly bad air quality. When coal was the principle heating fuel here, the winter months were ghastly. Combined with tail pipe emissions, prior to the federal environmental laws of the 1970s and the arrival of affordable home heating oil, there were extended periods when Fairbanks’ air was chokingly bad.

Much cleaner-burning heating oil has supplanted coal as the primary heating fuel since construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But recent spikes in heating oil prices have sent some citizens scurrying to alternative energy sources, including external wood-fired boilers. These are essentially giant wood stoves, set away from the house, that furnish hot water for heat. Some of these products produce truly appalling amounts of air pollution, partly as a result of wretched design and partly because their owners burn green wood, automobile tires, coal, dog crap, plastics and worse. When such a boiler is located in an urbanized area, the fumes are inflicted on the neighbors. When such a boiler is located next door to an elementary school, the problem is even worse. It’s a known, acknowledged health hazard.

There’s been an immense amount of legal and legislative sparring and wrangling over the problem. A current effort is a citizen initiative, Borough Proposition #2, which would regulate these point sources of air pollution.

It’s the context of this relatively mild effort to solve a very serious health issue that Alaskans for Limited Government has weighed in with an extended blog post, claiming that anyone supporting Proposition #2 is an “advocate of unlimited government.” For an organization that claims logic and reason as its guideposts, that an appalling example of hyperbole. In fact, the entire blog post is chock full of the kind of silly errors and excitable hyperbole WC has come to expect from the anti-tax, anti-government crowd in Interior Alaska.

Some examples:

Most armchair environmentalists, in spite of their good intentions, refuse to consider the entire impact of their decisions and remain myopic to their personal agenda. For example, paper sacks were frowned upon because trees were consumed in the process. Industry responded with plastic bags that would remain toxic to landfills. The end result of frantic emotions was the creation of a greater threat to Mother Earth and the human race.

That turns out not to be such a good example. The switch to plastic bags was an industry effort to reduce costs; plastic bags are cheaper to make than paper bags. Environmentalism didn’t enter into the decision. You can still ask for paper and not plastic at most grocery stores. The plastic bags are designed to break down in the environment. All major stores recycle plastic bags. And, in any event, those “arm chair environmentalists” you deprecate generally bring reusable bags. And WC is unaware of any evidence that the cumulative effect of plastic bags is actually worse than the cumulative effect of the same number of paper bags.

Another quote:

Let’s not forget that many businesses and homeowners switched to wood and coal to decrease dependency on fossil fuels. When demand decreases, supply increases and price decreases. All of us benefit from their actions.

There are two items in this quote that should make a responsible blogger cringe. First, coal is a fossil fuel. Seriously, Mr. Alexion, think about it. Burning coal is burning a fossil fuel. It doesn’t reduce dependency on fossil fuels. It’s swapping one kind of fossil fuel for another.

Second, petroleum is famously price inelastic. Reducing demand for heating oil, a petroleum product, in Fairbanks, Alaska, isn’t going to have any impact at all on the price of heating oil. The tiny fraction of North Slope production we consume isn’t going to have any impact at all on the price we are charged. Before you opine further on economics, WC recommends you study the subject just a bit.

But once you get past the bad examples, the bad economics and the hyperbole, Mr. Alexion’s point seems to be that we should all be able to get along. He’s asking, “Can’t we just work this out without the government getting involved?”

That hasn’t worked so well, has it? Even the subsidized exchange of the really bad furnaces for less horrible ones hasn’t worked. Scofflaws refuse to pay even part of the price for a new furnace. Of course, if we were all good neighbors, none of us would drive drunk. Or burglarize houses. Or clog the courts with domestic violence cases. Sometimes it takes the force of law to bring a scofflaw around to reason. It’s the reality. Not everyone plays nice without the threat of the government.

All of which is why WC will be voting in favor of Proposition #2. And yes, WC has a wood stove, and uses it for heat into early winter. And yes, it is a modern stove that meets environmental requirements. And no, WC bought it with his own hard-earned money, not with a government subsidy. And yes, WC burns only seasoned wood. The guy down at the bottom of Summit Drive? No so much.

By the way, WC would claim Rocky MacDonald, this organization’s treasurer, as a friend. But it doesn’t make him, or his organization, right about this issue.

So vote “Yes” on Borough Proposition #2.

This is WC’s own opinion, not paid for by anyone else. No money was expended in creating or posting this blog entry.

How Privatization is a Lie

Much has been made of the importance of privatizing government functions, particularly in the Department of Defense. The private sector, the claim goes, is always more efficient than the public sector.

That turns out to be seriously untrue.

In the first major study WC has seen, the Project on Government Oversight (“POGO”) analyzed the total compensation paid to federal and private sector employees, and annual billing rates for contractor employees across 35 occupational classifications covering over 550 service activities. POGO estimated the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services. Specifically, POGO’s study showed that the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.8 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.

Some other important findings:

• Federal government employees were less expensive than contractors in 33 of the 35 occupational classifications POGO reviewed.
• In one instance, contractor billing rates were nearly 5 times more than the full compensation paid to federal employees performing comparable services.
• Private sector compensation was lower than contractor billing rates in all 35 occupational classifications we reviewed.
• The federal government has failed to determine how much money it saves or wastes by outsourcing, insourcing, or retaining services, and has no system for doing so.

What the study showed is that comparing federal to private sector compensation to the individuals delivering the services reveals nothing about what it actually costs the government to outsource those services. The only analysis that will shed light on the true costs of government is that of contractor billing rates and the full cost of employing federal employees to perform comparable work.

Beyond that, it’s clear the federal government is not doing a good job of obtaining genuine market prices, and therefore the savings often promised in connection with outsourcing services are not being realized. The argument for outsourcing services is that, by outsourcing services on which the government holds a monopoly, free market competition will result in efficiencies and save taxpayer dollars. But our study showed that using contractors to perform services may actually increase rather than decrease costs to the taxpayers. Far too many contracts are awarded without real competition, creating no incentive for economies.

The bottom line is that taxpayers have been sold another bill of goods. We’re not getting private sector rates; we’re getting special government rates. It’s classic bait and switch. The United States has created a shadow government of private contractors who aren’t held to account, on the premise that it is saving the taxpayers money. The premise is false. It turns out it is 1.8 to 2.0 times more expensive, 3 times as expensive as the private sector.

Every American should read the POGO study, or at least the Executive Summary. Want to reduce government spending? Stop privatization. Of course, since this study contradicts everything the Teabaggers believe about government, they’ll ignore it. But it doesn’t make it any less real.

Doonesbury Censored – Again

The blogosphere is all aflutter over many newspapers decision to censor Doonesbury’s recent series of cartoons on Joe McGinnis’s upcoming exposé, The Rogue. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, never a newspaper to rush into the breach, apparently “didn’t have room” to publish today’s cartoon. As a service to his readers, WC provides a link to the cartoon’s internet home: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip.

The quotes pulled from the book are pretty good, too:

On her first day of office, Sarah changed the screensaver on the mayor’s official computer to read, ‘GOD LOVES YOU, SARAH PALIN.’

In a cartoon series that has savaged clueless reporter Hedley, Fox News, Sarah Palin and even Joe McGinnis, Garry Trudeau has again demonstrated why he remains America’s consistently best cartoonist, 40 years down the line. Props to Trudeau; shame on the News-Miner.

 

An Open Letter to Don Young

The Honorable Don Young
Office of Congressman Don Young
2314 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman Young:

The media report that you were in Alaska, not Washington, D.C. this week, despite Congress now being in session. The media also report that you were unable to tear yourself away from the an NFL game to watch all of the President’s speech on jobs creation.

Congressman, you are paid $174,000 and a ton of perks each year to be Alaska’s sole representative to the House of Representatives. At a time of national crisis, with essentially all of Congress’s work not yet done, you are cooling your heels in Alaska? Your broken branch of government hasn’t passed a single appropriation for the next fiscal year, which starts in three weeks. The unemployment rate is shockingly high. You’re just coming off a three week plus paid vacation. And you can’t muster the energy to go and do your job?

You don’t care enough to even watch the President of the United States? If you can’t show respect for the man, can’t you at least show respect for the office?

And you have the unmitigated gall to complain about the deficits afterwards? This from the godfather of pork? Alaskans will listen to your complaints when you explain that freeway interchange in Florida. Or the $2 million in legal fees you refuse to discuss.

Do you think you are entitled to your office as a matter of right? Have to served so long that you think your conduct is irrelevant?

You are, what, the third most senior member of the House? Where was that seniority, where was that leadership, where was that much-vaunted experience and leadership during the shameful fight over the national debt ceiling?

What is Alaska getting for its money? Besides a football fan?

Is WC the only one who finds you mortifyingly embarrassing?

Hello? Are you there? Anybody home?

/Wickersham’s Conscience

Better Than Windows Vista

Windows 7

WC is a fan of XKCD, one of the best web comic out there on the Series of Tubes™. WC is also a Mac user, dating back to the original Macintosh, and the mess that was Windows Vista gave him considerable pleasure smirking. But the tag line, “Better than Vista,” has much broader utility than merely pwning a lame operating system. WC will offer some examples:

It’s pretty clear that,as many of us suspected from the start, Palin’s pride and joy, the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (“AGIA”) is a complete bust. On the available evidence, no one, not one North Slope natural gas producer, has signed up to ship their gas to the Lower 48 via Transcanada, The Quitter’s hand-picked gas pipeline company. That won’t stop Transcanada from exhausting ever penny of the $500 million the State of Alaska pledged to underwrite Transcanada’s efforts. Still, it’s better than Windows Vista.

The Quitter herself, unable to complete an intelligible sentence, a gubernatorial term or an intellectual conversation, is still flirting with her dwindling coterie of supporters and inflicting herself on the body politic. That helium and fingernails-on-a-chalkboard voice will keep on screeching nonsense. Still, she’s better than Windows Vista.

PolticProf has conveniently summarized the September 7 GOP presidential wannabe debates, which WC presents here:

Rick Perry: Texas is good. I like Texas.
Mitt Romney: Seriously, I have a plan. And I used to work in business.
Michele Bachmann: I have crazy eyes.
Ron Paul: I am a very cranky old man.
Jon Huntsman: You get that I’m the reasonable one, right?
Newt Gingrich: I am a lot smarter than these other folks. Not that you care.
Herman Cain: I speak in clear, plain sentences to convince you that the complex is simple.
Rick Santorum: I’m over here. Hi! Hello! Woo hoo!

Still, they’re better than Windows Vista… Wait. No. They’re not.

Trying to Understand Republicans

The thing that baffles WC about the approach Republicans are taking to governance is that they keep threatening to burn the house down, when they live in that house. WC suspects Andrew Sullivan has at least an idea what is going on:

That’s how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

The ironic thing – at least WC thinks it may be ironic – is that this is very nearly jihadist thinking. These neo-cons, in many ways, have become the very thing they claim to fear the most: unprincipled religious zealots. They cannot see how close their America would be to modern-day Iran.