Wickersham's Conscience

Chicken Little Reports the Sky Is Falling

“Oh Hen Pen,” said Chicken Little, “The sky is falling.”

“Why Chicken Little, how do you know it?”

“Oh, I heard it with my own ears, saw it with my eyes and part of it fell on my tail.”

“Come then,” said Hen Pen, “Let us run as fast as we can.”

The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little, Freddie W. Duncan (Degen, Estates & Co., 1865)

Oil Industry Lobbyist and Governor Sean Parnell issued an “Action Alert” Monday reporting that the sky was falling. The pipeline, the Governor said, is running out of oil, and soon we shall all be broke. The action alert was silent as to whether a piece of the sky had actually fallen on the Governor’s tail.

Worse, the state senate was refusing to run as fast as it could. It was actually checking to see if the sky was falling, rather than simply believing Chicken Little. The horror.

In fact, the Governor was so excited about the sky falling that he lied and said the state senate was thinking about raising taxes, and not running as fast as it could. The Governor’s very own Commissioner of Revenue had to correct the Governor.

Before we abandon this useful and instructive tale, let’s remember how it ended.

Chicken Little had all the barnyard birds running as fast as they could, until they ran into the Fox. The Fox offered to hide them all in his den.

Fox Lox Shelters Chicken Little

Just so.

Are there any questions?

Various Republican presidential wannabes have accused President Obama of  ”class warfare” for suggesting that the wealthiest one percent of Americans should be paying more taxes. But that’s nonsense. This is what real class warfare looks like:

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Santorum is not arguing about the president’s policies (which are actually all about vocational training and apprenticeships). Santorum is lying about the character of the president. Santorum attempts to accuse the President of being contemptuous of the working class. Santorum calls Obama what no Republican has yet called Romney: a “snob.”

Not an argument. Not a policy difference. Class hatred. The pure quill. And this is what is driving the base of the GOP.

There is a word for this kind of candidate in a political campaign: demagogue.

And there’s a proverb that the avowedly pious ex-Senator should know:  ”For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” King James Bible, Hosea 8:7.

DOMA is the Defense of Marriage Act, the Republican Congress’s and President George W. Bush’s homophobic response to the risk that gays might have civil rights. With very little fanfare, and almost no response from the equally homophobic Republican presidential wannabes, DOMA was found unconstitutional last week by Judge Jeffrey White of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Judge White’s full decision is available on-line. Lawyers and new judges should study it as an example of how a trial court should lay out the law and the facts. Judge White makes skillful use of precedent, provides damning quotes from the Congressional zealots who enacted the law and without any fuss or histrionics finds the thing is unconstitutional. Oh, and Judge White was nominated by that same President Bush and confirmed by those same homophobes that passed DOMA. Sweet.

The case is not without other irony. It was brought by a judicial branch employee, legally married in the State of California. When the judicial bureaucracy refused to allow the plaintiff to extend health care benefits to the plaintiff’s spouse, because she was the same sex in violation of DOMA, the plaintiff brought the suit. There was some skirmishing among the various agencies inside the federal court system, but ultimately the case landed on Judge White’s bench.

The Obama administration had long since concluded that DOMA was legally indefensible. Never shy about its own bigotry, something calling itself the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States House of 18 Representatives (“BLAG”) joined in the attempted defense of DOMA.

Federal case law provides two different levels of scrutiny when a statute is challenged as a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Where the rights involve are a protected classification – involving issues like race, religion or gender – the standard is “heightened scrutiny,:” and the government is required to demonstrate that the classification is substantially related to an important governmental objective. Laws that do not burden a protected class or infringe on a constitutionally protected fundamental right are subject to a less rigorous “rational basis” review. Romer, 517 U.S. at 631. 28 Under the rational basis review, a law must be rationally related to the furtherance of a legitimate governmental interest.

Judge White, in a very careful, methodical analysis, found that gay rights were entitled to the higher standard, strict scrutiny. Citing to the legislative history, Judge white noted:

The House Report on DOMA reflected Congress’ “moral disapproval of homosexuality, and a moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo-Christian) morality.” H.R. Rep. No. 104-664 at 16 (footnote omitted). In his expression of these objectives, Henry Hyde, then-Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stated that “[m]ost people do not approve of homosexual conduct … and they express their disapprobation through the law.”

But “moral disapproval” and a “majority opinion” do not of themselves support a law that treats one class of person differently than another. At various times in our history, there has been “moral disapproval” of civil rights for racial minorities, smuggling slaves to freedom in Canada, integration, American Indians, women voting and a host of other issues. Of itself, it is no basis for a law that creates separate, inferior classes of citizens. So, at the risk of simplification, Judge White found that DOMA violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution and found it to be unconstitutional.

But that was the stricter, “Strict scrutiny” standard. Judge White went further and found that even under the weaker, “rational basis” standard, in the event gays were not entitled to a protected rights classification, DOMA still failed. The law, he concluded, had no rational basis.

Judge White was well aware his decision would not win him any prizes in conservative circles. He concluded:

The Court has found that DOMA unconstitutionally discriminates against same-sex married couples. Even though animus is clearly present in its legislative history, the Court, having examined that history, the arguments made in its support, and the effects of the law, is persuaded that something short of animus may have motivated DOMA’s passage:

Prejudice, we are beginning to understand, rises not from malice or hostile animus alone. It may result as well from insensitivity caused by simple want of careful, rational reflection or from some instinctive mechanism to guard against people who appear to be different in some respects from ourselves.

Board of Trustees of University of Alabama v. Garrett, 531 U.S. 356, 374-75 (2001) (Kennedy, J., concurring).

This case was presented by an employee of the judicial branch against the executive branch, which ultimately determined it could not legitimately support the law. The law was then defended by the legislative branch. The judicial branch is tasked with determining whether this federal law is unconstitutional. That is the courts’ authority and responsibility. “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is” and, where it is so, to declare legislation unconstitutional. See Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 2 177 (1803). As Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts said during his confirmation hearings: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. … it’s [the judge’s] job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr. to be Chief Justice of the United States: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 56 (2005) (statement of John G. Roberts, Jr., Nominee).

While WC doesn’t commonly agree with Judge White’s decisions – he really is very conservative – in this case he gets full props for being forthright, honest and calling it as he sees it. There are members of Congress and candidates for President who will probably call for Judge White’s impeachment. He will be denounced from pulpits. But he is right.

The case doesn’t stop here, of course. Doubtlessly BLAG, oblivious to the fact it has been badly gored by its own words, will appeal. And if the case ends of in the U.S. Supreme Court – still two steps away – who knows what the majority there will do. They’ve already disdained precedent, law and logic. But this decision is a start.

Props to blogger Matt Yglesias for this masterpiece:

Romney's Blunders, Part XXXI

If you need background, here’s the Nascar faux paux, and here Mitt jumping up and down in his earlier Cadillac cow pie.

WC thinks an Okapi looks like it was designed by a committee. Start with the hindquarters and forelegs of a zebra. Add the torso and general build of a large antelope. And then stick on the head of a giraffe.

Okapi (Okapia johnstoni), San Diego Safari Park

In a way, the Okapi is a “living fossil,” with most of its close relatives long extinct. It’s closest relative is the giraffe, but the Okapi is a distant cousin. Only the tongue is really comparable, and the Okapi tongue is pretty amazing:

Okapi's Tongue in Action

Butter lettuce is apparently irresistible to Okapi; note the last 6-7 inches of tongue is wrapped around the lettuce held out by Mrs. WC. The Okapi tongue is long enough it can wash its ears, inside and out. There’s not much WC can add to that simple statement.

The Okapi is solitary, unlike the giraffe. It forages and breeds in the Ituri Rainforest in southcentral Africa, where it is classified as near-threatened, mostly by reason of range loss.

This was one of the stops on the “behind the scenes” tour at San Diego Zoo Safari Park. It’s isn’t inexpensive, but they give you a close up and personal view of some pretty cool critters. Not everyone can claim to have hand-fed an Okapi.

WC won’t be attending the Fairbanks Concert Association’s New Shanghai Circus performance this weekend. The tickets went to young friends with a small child whose sense of marvel should be considerably expanded by the experience.

So instead of a concert review, here’s a concert request. Bring Jake Shimabukuro to Fairbanks next year. He was on the reader choice form at one point. Why Shimabukuro? Here’s why:

.

“Virtuoso ukelele player” sounds like a joke. It’s absolutely not. The kid is simply terrific. If Eric Clapton played ukelele, it would sound like this.

How about it, FCA?

Remember, if everybody played the ukelele, the world would be a better place.

There are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren’t.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

We’ve all been to parties where someone brightly announces, “I’m not any good at math.” WC has joked that if he had been good at math he wouldn’t have had to go to law school. But as often as WC bemoans the near-illiteracy of too many bloggers, and the functional illiteracy of those who post on-line comments on newspaper stories. math skills – innumeracy – are actually even worse.

Exercise:

Your buddy Dogbert offers you a $10 lottery ticket for half price, just $5. The catch is that the odds of winning with the ticket are lower than other tickets by  just 0.00001%. Should you buy the ticket?

As far as WC can tell, it’s a mix of both flaws in the U.S. education system and flaws in our culture. The weaknesses aren’t uniform across the fifty states:

Math Skills by Countries and States

Math proficiency by jurisdiction, part 2

The chart asks good questions, like why Idaho students are 20% less proficient at math than Massachusetts students. What does having 70% of the Idaho’s population be less than proficient mean for Idaho? For the nation?

WC can point to factors that can be excluded. Neocons blame teachers’ unions, but many countries with much more entrenched labor organizations score better than the U.S. France, for example, has a particularly militant teachers’ union, but France does much better than the U.S. at math proficiency.

By contrast, per capita Gross State Product – total economic output by a state divided by population – is a decent predictor of math proficiency. The U.S’s two best states at student math proficiency, Massachusetts and Minnesota, are also among the highest in  per capita GSP.

Harvard has published a detailed study on the problem. And perhaps the study documents a motivation for getting serious about innumeracy: money. If the U.S. could improve math proficiency by just 2-3% a year, and raise skill levels to something like Canada’s or South Korea’s, the economic impact would be astonishing.

When translated into dollar terms, these magnitudes become staggering. If one calculates these percentage increases as national income projections over an 80-year period (providing for a 20-year delay before any school reform is completed and the newly proficient students begin their working careers), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests gains of nothing less than $75 trillion over the period. That averages out to around a trillion dollars a year. Even if you tweak these numbers a bit in one direction or another to account for various uncertainties, you reach the same bottom line: Those who say that student math performance does not matter are clearly wrong.

There are some promising solutions to parts of the problem. The Posse Foundation has founds ways to encourage greater undergraduate success, including success in maths and higher maths. Harvard, pretty typically, does a fine job of defining the problem but fails to provide solutions.

But it’s a serious issue, and one that doesn’t seem be getting addressed.

PS. If a lottery ticket gives you one chance in a million of winning, and the odds on Dogbert’s ticket are 0.00001% lower, you’re buying a ticket that has expired. It’s wastepaper.

Richard Ekow channels a message to Santorum and The Quitter. It’s worth the read just for the last lines:

I know, I know. You grew up working class. If you’ve said it once you’ve said it a thousand times: You used to be a regular guy. So what? I used to be an angel.

Somewhat against his better judgment, WC attended the opening day of Titanic: The Artifact Exposition at the San Diego Natural History Museum on February 11. Visitors were issued a card at the door. The front was a mock-up of a Boarding Pass for the Titanic:

Titantic Exhibit - Boarding Pass

It is the 100th Anniversary of the big ship’s sinking, but western culture – not just Americans –  never needed an excuse to obsess over the disaster. Even before the James Cameron movie, we’ve been fascinated with the ship and the disaster, almost since the news the ship had hit the berg.

The back of each card was issued in the name of a passenger, something WC hadn’t known at the start. WC was given the identity of John Henry Chapman.

Titantic Exhibit - Bio Card Issued to WC

The whole business seemed more than a little ghoulish to WC. But after springing for $20 to get in, WC felt as if he needed to go through with it. The tour included a mix of the usual signs and computer animated exhibits of the ship, her history, the fatal run and the sinking. But the bulk of the exhibit was made up of ship’s gear – mostly dining room stuff – and numerous personal effects of passengers. The shaving kit of one passenger; the suitcase and contents of another. All retrieved from the bottom of the Atlantic. Postcards written but never sent. Pages of personal journals. Jewelry. Toothbrushes. It seemed more than a little disrespectful. WC supposes it is impressive technology that recovers china plates and pocket change from 2.5 miles down. But technologically advanced grave robbing is still grave robbing.

WC has always regarded the Titantic disaster as a consequence of horrible hubris that killed 1,517 innocent passengers. “Unsinkable” ships. Blasting through a pitch dark, moonless ocean at 21 knots or more after receiving at least two warnings of large icebergs in the waters. A ship with 2,201 persons on board that had lifeboats for only 1,178. The ghoulish fascination with the consequences of that hubris has always been . . . unseemly . . . to WC and the unrelenting pawing through the wreckage smacks to WC of grave robbing. The seafloor where the ship lies is a mass grave for 1,517 souls. WC thinks it is bad manners, at least, to ransack, to pilfer that mass grave.

The exhibit was certainly well done, and provided a kind of insight into the lives of First, Second and Steerage passengers of the era. The story is well-told, and based on the length of the lines when we left, immensely popular. WC admits to not understanding the ongoing fascination. The sinking of the Titanic did lead to reform of some areas of ship safety and design. Small comfort to the families of those who died.

As we left the exhibit, there was a large display listing who had lived and who had died. There were helpful guides to assist you in finding “your” name. The passenger named on WC’s “Boarding Pass,” John Henry Chapman, died in the sinking of the Titantic. Requiescat in pace.

WC was in the Lower 48 recently, and every conversation with an Outsider, sooner or later, turned to Alaska’s Shame, The Quitter. It’s very embarrassing.

But a new Alaska figure is emerging who has the potential to be even more embarrassing than The Quitter. You might not have thought that was possible. WC might have even thought it was impossible. But then along came Gordon Warren Epperly. Juneauites will know him from his incessant letters to the Juneau Empire.

To call him a “gadfly” is to give mortal insult to Insecta in general and Diptera in particular. Some folks may find maggots disgusting, but calling Citizen Epperly a gadfly gives maggots a bad name.

Citizen Epperly has filed a complaint with the Director of the Division of Elections seeking to keep President Obama’s name of the ballot in Alaska. WC has provided that link to his vindictive, ignorant and puerile racist screed, but WC also warns you to prepare to be outraged. This is seriously far over into tin foil hat territory.

Not all citizens are apparently satisfied with having their racism and misogyny be a subtext to their hatred. Citizen Epperly brings them front and center.

Worse, national bloggers have reported on it. Dr. Conspiracy has picked up on it and posted a deconstruction.

WC isn’t sure that the State of Alaska is paying Gail Fenumiai, the Director of the Division of Elections, enough money. First she had to put up with Joe Miller’s incessant lawsuits; now this. She’s good. Her decisions are proven sound. She needs a raise if she has to deal with this kind of crap.

Can Citizen Epperly please take his medications, don his tin foil hat and crawl back under his rock?

So, according to Republican ex-Senator and Presidential Wannabe Rick Santorum,

“I refer to global warming as not climate science, but political science,” surging Republican presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist Rick Santorum said Monday in Steubenville, OH. “A lot of these environmental sciences are just that – political sciences. They have nothing to do with … real understanding of how we have to value both the environment and its impact on man and the world.”

More recently, Tin Foil Rick appeared on the PBS News Hour to repeat his belief that global wamring is “political science,” not “climate science.”

Before we all break out our tin foil hats and join Santorum (BS, Political Science, MBA, JD) in his conspiracy delusions, let’s have a brief look at what would be required for the ex-Senator to be right.

• A vast network on scientists, who can’t agree on anything else, all agree to engage in a conspiracy to delude the world in thousands of studies, all supporting the existence of global warming. Not one, not a single scientist ‘fesses up.
• The vast conspiracy, the scoop of the century for any mainstream media outlet, is not reported. Not even the supermarket journalists, who previously documented Satan;s escape from Hell through a North Slope oil well. This may mean they are a part of the vast conspiracy, too.
• Most of the United Nations, excepting only a few political hacks appointed by former Pres. Bush, fall for the vast conspiracy, or may be part of the conspiracy as well.
• High school physics experiments in which teenage students demonstrate increased CO2 concentrations elevate temperatures are somehow wrong, suggesting the vast conspiracy has the power to reach into high school classrooms and booger the data.
• The oceans are becoming increasingly acidic, not as a result of absorbing CO2 but from some other, as yet undocumented source. Perhaps the acidic bile spewing from the mouths of Republican presidential candidates?
• The arctic ice cap has not disappeared, suggesting the the vast conspiracy has the power to booger satellite images as well as high school lab experiments.
• Rush Limbaugh was correct about something.

WC wants to introduce the ex-Senator to a logical principle, Occam’s Razor. It says that “a principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.” The professedly Catholic ex-Senator should like this principle; it was invented by a Catholic, a Franciscan friar, William of Okham.

For climate change to be true, known, demonstrable physical laws – the so-called “greenhouse gases – have to be true. For Santorum to be right, for climate change to be wrong, not only do the physical laws have to somehow be wrong, but also there has to be a truly gigantic conspiracy to hide the fact that those physical laws are false. Occam’s Razor makes quick work of Santorum. The late Carl Sagan put it another way: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Ex-Senator Santorum, where’s your extraordinary proof?

It’s easy for politicians to pander. It’s patently obvious politicians can be ignorant; look no further than the last Republican vice presidential candidate.

But this is the future of the freaking planet you are talking about. Whether you are ignorant, pandering or flat out delusional, it’s way beyond stupid to be taking these kinds of chances with your children and your grandchildren’s future.

The ex-Sentator is far too dangerous to the planet to allow his idiot views to go unchallenged. WC declares intellectual warfare on Rick Santorum. Sure, it’s an unfair battle, but WC will do his best to keep up with some of the filthy stream of misogynism, sexism, homophobia, Christianisim, anti-intellectualism, debased pandering and general bigotry that spews from this alleged human being.

Once again, Randall Munroe of XKCD has summarized a problem in a three panel cartoon better than WC can in ten paragraphs of technogeekery. So WC will simply post the cartoon without further comment.

Standards

It’s perfect.

Shell Drilling Rig Discoverer (Photo by Royal Dutch Shell)

Royal Dutch Shell continues to inch towards drilling in the Chukchi Sea, possibly as early as Spring 2013. WC believes there will be a disaster, that it will not be contained with any degree of effectiveness, and that the Chukchi Sea and its marine environment will be permanently and seriously damaged. It’s not just WC’s normally pessimistic view of oil field technology in general and Big Oil in particular. It is simply learning the lessons of experience.

ITEM. We have the lesson of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Eleven killed, sixteen injured and 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled. The abject failure of technology, the corner-cutting at the expense of safety, the lies from the industry and the clumsy response are all matters of public record. Shell attempts to distinguish the Deepwater Horison from the Chukchi Drilling efffort: Deepwater involved 5,000 feet of water, while the Chuckchi project is about 150 feet. But the Deepwater involved a shirtsleeve climate, immense resources only 75 miles away and, of course, water that is a liquid year round. The Chukchi project involves severely limited resources at least a thousand miles away, a true arctic environment and ice that’s ten feet thick.

ITEM. Off shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is a relatively mature technology; there are literally thousands of wells. The Chukchi project is the first true offshore (as opposed to man-made island-based) drilling in the arctic environment in the United States. It is unprecedented. All technology, by definition, is experimental and unproven.

ITEM. Alaska has the experience of the Exxon Valdez, and the lasting damage to Prince William Sound, the failure of cleanup technologies in a much milder climate and utter failure of Exxon to behave effectively or responsibly. Alaska has the experience of BP plc, which has failed to adequately maintain the feeder lines and other infrastructure on the North Slope. And the lessons of history: when the going gets tough, the big corporations simply leave. Ask McCarthy whether Kennecott was to be trusted.

ITEM. Respol, a pretty respectable mid-major Spanish oil company, had Nabors Drilling working on a new well on the Qugruk #2 pad in the Colville Delta earlier this year. They hit an unexpected pocket of gas. The well, still at a relatively shallow 2,523 feet, blew out, spewing 42,000 gallons of drilling mud, natural gas and whatever else was in the gas pocket all over the Colville Delta. The drill rig had to be shut down to avoid an explosion. The rig, the blown-out mud and everything else, froze in the sub-zero temperatures. Now, in the memorable phrase of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, just re-starting the drilling rig – the first step to controlling the well – “has proven a difficult task.” There is no time frame for getting that situation under control.

Now imagine a gas kickback like the incident at Qugruk #2 Pad 70 miles off shore, perhaps with the added challenge of mixed gas and oil merrily bubbling into the Chukchi Sea while Shell tries to deal with a drilling rig coated in frozen mud and a damaged drill rig, on a platform that’s been evacuated because there’s explosive natural gas around. The Qugruk well blew on February 15; more than a week later, the well is still not under control. How long would control take 70 miles off shore? Oh, and add in a typical bad Chukchi storm for more excitement.

Is there a single, informed person (other than Sean Parnell), not employed by the oil industry, who thinks that kind of disaster can be managed? Who thinks an oil company can be trusted? Trusted with the future of the Chukchi Sea? The subsistence life of the Inupiaq people? Who thinks this kind of disaster can’t happen?

Is there anyone who believes that, in the event of a disaster, Shell will behave more responsibly than Exxon? Than BP?

WC bows to no one in his respect for technology. WC invented the term “technogeekery” to describe himself. But there is no technology to deal with these kinds of problems. It doesn’t exist. Shell has disaster plans, but these are words on paper. Respol had a disaster plan. Reality is something else entirely. It’s the lesson of experience.

Republican ex-Senator and Presidential Wannabe Rick Santorum is a lawyer (Dickinson, 1986). Presumably he was awake for most of his Constitutional Law class. So he should have a nodding familiarity with Article VI, paragraph 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

The smart guys who wrote the Constitution had watched Europe endure centuries of wars over religion. A variety of Test Acts were enacted in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their main purpose was to exclude anyone not a member of the Church of England from holding government office, notably Catholics and ”nonconforming” Protestants. You know, like the Puritans. Government officials were required to swear oaths, such as the Oath of Supremacy, that the monarch of England was the head of the Church and that they possessed no other foreign loyalties, such as to the Pope. Later acts required officials to disavow transubstantiation and the veneration of saints.

Many American colonists had left England in part to gain a measure of religious freedom. With the British government’s religious favoritism fresh in their memory, the Founders sought to prevent the return of the Test Acts by adding this clause to the Constitution.

You’d think an avowedly devout Catholic would be sensitive to Constitutional provisions which protect, among others, Catholics. You’d be wrong about that. Santorum told Teabagger supporters at a Columbus, Ohio hotel that President Obama’s agenda is

. . . not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.

In Senator Santorum’s world, you cannot be president unless you have the right religion. Christians with a different world view are ineligible. And atheists can just immediately go burn in Hell, presumably. If the Christianist Teabaggers had half a brain, they’d go find another candidate. A truly devout Catholic would also call, say, the Southern Baptist Church a “phony theology.” And there’s religious coding against The Mitt in that statement, too. The Catholic Church regards Mormons as pagans.

Santorum has openly called for making the United States a Catholic state, rejecting President Kennedy’s separation of private religious belief and public responsibility:

He told National Catholic Review that a distinction between private religious conviction and public responsibility, enshrined in Kennedy’s famous speech in 1960 saying he would not take orders from the Catholic church if elected president, has caused “much harm in America. All of us have heard people say, ‘I privately am against abortion, homosexual marriage, stem cell research, cloning. But who am I to decide that it’s not right for somebody else?’ It sounds good,” Santorum said. “But it is the corruption of freedom of conscience.”

Yeah. It also happens to be the law. Constitutional law, no less.

But law, logic and the U.S. Constitution don’t enter into this Republican primary.

State Street, San Diego, California

Photo taken by Mrs. WC in a traffic jam in downtown San Diego. Is this post-ironic commentary or just someone who thinks irony is rusty water? WC is confused.

UPDATE: Richard Ditch offers the following gem, which qualifies as delusional, not post-ironic:

You Have to Wonder - Photo © Richard Ditch

A quick followup to WC’s earlier post on the OOTS Kickstarter campaign. Web comic artist Rich Burlew raised a total of $1,254,120 from 14,952 donors. The total amount raised is over twenty-one times his target of $57,750. WC’s sincere congratulations to Rich and Giant in the Playground, his company.

There’s a delightful interview of Rich Burlew by Kickstarter.

Any questions about the power of social media as a funding mechanism seem to have been answered.

Doubtlessly, even as WC writes this scam artists are scheming at how to make their own million bucks. And WC hopes the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is on top of this; the potential for securities fraud – promises to pay investors something more than refrigerator magnets – is frighteningly high.

But for now, congratulations to Rich Burlew, who deserves and has earned every penny.

Silverback Mountain Gorilla

Some photos don’t need an extended caption. San Diego Wildlife Safari, February 2012.

George Washington, by Gilbert Stuart, 1796

Everyone has a few pet peeves. Okay, WC demonstrably has more than a few. But one of WC’s pet peeves is the whole business with “Presidents’ Day.”

Alaska law makes the third Monday in February “Presidents’ Day.” Of course, it used to be celebrated as Washington’s Birthday, and actually celebrated on February 22, the real date George Washington was born. And the federal holiday is still called Washington’s Birthday. None of this “Presidents’ Day” stuff for the Feds, proving they can get some things right. Washington’s birthday got changed to a floating date as apart of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, a triumph of convenience over history, back in 1971.

Some states, including Alaska, formerly recognized Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday as a holiday. Sensible states still do.  But apparently someone at the Alaska Chamber of Commerce decided having two holidays in one month was wasteful. But then the Chamber of Commerce is still annoyed by the ideas of holidays in general, minimum wages and overtime. The Chamber of Commerce thinks Foxconn is just fine and that we should stop scrutinizing it. But WC has again indulged his tendency to digress.

No, WC’s peeve is that by celebrating “Presidents’ Day” seems to imply we need to honor all presidents. Not just Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. No , the generic Alaska version of the holiday demands we honor Richard Nixon, Warren G. Harding, Millard Filmore and, shudder, George W. Bush.

WC isn’t having any of it. WC is celebrating Washington’s Birthday today, thank you very much.

If you agree with WC that George W. Bush doesn’t deserve a state holiday, write you legislators and demand they amend state law to restore the honor to the Father of Our Country, not to the sad posse of hacks that have served latterly. The Legislature’s not doing anything anyway. If they can spend hours debating and tweaking a resolution addressed to themselves, they have time for this more important task.

So here’s to you, George <clink>. And thanks.

Update: You think WC is worked up about this? Check out Stonekettle’s screed over at The Mudflats.

WC and Mrs. WC had a chance to visit the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute in La Jolla recently. It’s very nice, laid out for the various biomes along the Pacific coast, from the Straits of Juan de Fuca near Seattle down to the southern Mexican tropical waters. WC took the chance to play around with the higher ISO settings for his Olympus E-5 digital single lens reflex camera, shooting in the very low light. It’s a delicate business, keeping the shutter open long enough to get a decent exposure without blurring the subject. And jellyfish, in particular never hold still.

So, as an illustration of the Olympus E-5 performance in low light, here’s some photos of Pacific Sea Nettles, from one of several jellyfish tanks at Birch.

Pacific Sea Nettle, Birch Aquarium

This was taken at ISO1600, an unthinkably high “film” speed for a photographer who grew up with slide film. Many Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras perform as well at even higher speeds.

Birch Aquarium uses colored lights to bring out the detail and intensify the colors. Sometimes, parts of the jelly fish fluoresce oddly as in the next photo:

Pacific Sea Nettle, Second View, Birch Aquarium

WC has been stung by Sea Nettles in the southern Gulf of Alaska. On salt-toughened hands it’s hardly noticeable but on softer skin it will get your attention. Wiping the affected area with vinegar helps very much. Someday, WC will tell that whole story in an Epic Fail blog post. And WC hopes that his readers will forgive him for wishing the entire board of directors and senior management of Olympus the company might spend a long, intimate time swimming nude in a colony of Sea Nettles.

But I think you’ll agree that the E-5 does pretty well in these very low light conditions, allowing a shutter speed which mostly freezes the motion while allowing an aperture that gets most of the subtle detail throughout the animal. Yet another reason why WC likes the camera, even while he is furious with Olympus itself.

This is one of the longer posts WC has written. Unlike 95% of the stuff WC writes, this is completely serious. It’s also technical, wonkish and difficult. But it is also pretty important for anyone who cares about Alaska.

WC went to school in Fairbanks with some of the current members of the Alaska Legislature. And while those members are nice people, they were not – how to put this delicately – all among the brightest folks in the school. Democracies come with no assurance that the voters will pick the best and the brightest. And yet in the matter of Alaska’s oil tax structure, the Legislature finds its self faced with another Big, Ugly, Complex and Intractable Problem. A BUCIP (bew-kip). We need the very smartest folks we can find.

The Legislature hasn’t done well with BUCIPs in the past. They completely screwed up subsistence, you will recall, an earlier BUCIP. As a result, we have the Feds co-managing fish and game resources. Native tribal rights is another BUCIP, and there the Legislature’s inability to reach a consensus has led to the Alaska Court System having to lead the way, a task which the Alaska Supreme Court would be the first to admit should not be their responsibility. Even weaning Alaska from being an oil-dependent economy, another long-time BUCIP, remains unresolved.

Partly, the legislative failures are a result of history. In the matter of resource extraction, for example, Alaska has a wretched history of outsiders coming in, looting the resources, and leaving the state the worse for the experience. Furs. Salmon. Gold. Copper. One of the motivations for statehood was to try to keep that from happening again. That history informs both the actions and inactions of state government.

Partly, the legislative failures are the results of lobbying and influence-peddling. We’ve reached the point where an oil industry lobbyist is the governor of the state. Big money, big corporate money in particular, both directly and indirectly influences what passes for a decision-making process. Sometimes it results in no decisions getting made at all, as in the case of subsistence. A classic instance of inaction being a decision. That influence-peddling makes it hard for individual legislators to get objective information. That same influence-peddling makes it hard for Alaskans to trust their legislators. The indictment and conviction of a dozen or so state government officials, flawed as the federal investigation was, weakened that trust further still. The video images are simply damning.

Partly, the legislative failures are the result of the transformation of the electorate by the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend program. Alaskans have come to expect something for nothing. That’s never good in a democracy.

And partly it is the result of the state’s unhealthy, even poisonous dependence on oil extraction as effectively the state’s sole means of support.  For the state has a whole, it’s more than 90% of state revenues. That dependence allows Big Oil to run a bluff on the state: if you don’t let us have our way, we’ll take our marbles and go home, and let your state economy collapse. At the same time, that history WC talked about earlier has taught Alaskans that, especially in the case of non-renewable resources, we need to get everything we can while we can. Extraction industries haven’t done and won’t do the state any favors. Remember the Exxon Valdez.

So it’s in this context that the Legislature faces yet another BUCIP: revisions to or repeal of the oil tax structure, to ACES. He doesn’t say it outright, but the claim by Governor and oil industry lobbyist Sean Parnell is that Alaska has erred too far on the side of getting all we can while we can. Parnell’s syllogism is,

We have declining crude oil in the pipeline,
ACES imposes high taxes on putting crude oil in the pipeline,
Reducing taxes will put more crude oil in the pipeline.

The logic of that syllogism is deeply flawed. And the premises of the syllogism are deeply suspect already: ConocoPhillips was caught out in highly inconsistent claims on the minimum amount of crude oil required to operate the pipeline. The Governor tried to panic the Legislature into acting last session. Cooler heads in the Senate stopped the Governor’s $2 billion gift to Big Oil.

The Legislature – at least the Senate – felt it didn’t have enough information. It needed neutral advice. The closest thing to neutral advice that the Legislature has been able to find is oil economist Pedro van Meurs.

van Meurs, at the Senate’s request, has developed a proposal with significantly more granularity. Not all oil  is the same; some kinds are more expensive to than other kinds. van Meurs would tax different classes of crude oil at different rates to induce production of the more difficult products. So oil companies would get a larger tax allowance for producing more challenging types of crude. van Meurs proposes a whole different tax approach for natural gas. At the same time, he would halve the current tax credits for exploration, presently 40 percent.

van Meurs told State Senator Hollis French that Parnell’s bill was “a disaster.” van Meurs is also critical of the current tax credit arrangement, which rewards exploration but not production.

But the thing about oil economists is that they only answer the questions you ask. There are other, equally critical issues in this BUCIP that haven’t been adequately discussed. So here’s WC’s prescription for the oil taxation BUCIP:

First among those critical issues is the oil field infrastructure which, on the evidence, is falling apart. It will be abandoned by Big Oil at the point at which it is more expensive to maintain it than the revenue gained from using it. A sensible tax plan should encourage maintenance in the only language Big Oil knows: pay them to do a better job.

Second is, as van Meurs says, applying the right level of financial inducement to the right kinds of crude oil extraction. We need a better level of granularity in our oil tax. We may need to address separately natural gas.

Third, we will have to do a better job of policing Big Oil. Non-renewable resources are too valuable to allow Big Oil or anyone else to play hide-the-facts games with Alaska. Alaska needs to write tougher disclosure rules on Big Oil. The data can be kept confidential if Alaska can find, hire and retain the right people to review that data. That’s going to require paying some significant salaries. Those kinds of smarts don’t come cheap. And a willingness on the part of the State to take Big Oil to court as often as necessary.

Fourth, Alaska needs to do more to encourage competition on the North Slope. Not just among the oligarchy that is Big Oil; the effort should extend to oil field service companies, supplies and facilities. The price of doing work on the Slope can be greatly reduced by encouraging more competition. Reducing the cost of doing business will make it less expensive to put oil in the pipeline.

Fifth and last, ACES has to stay in place until all of these elements have been accomplished. ACES, whatever its flaws – and WC isn’t admitting it is flawed – is a terrific lever, an excellent bargaining tool. Alaska should not surrender that bargaining tool until a better solution is in fully place.

This is not going to be an easy task. Writing laws to implement these five elements is likely beyond the skills of the Legislature. WC encourages the Legislature to hire some serious expertise for the task. Lately, there’s been a “not invented here” attitude in the Alaska Legislature. It’s damfoolishness. Alaska’s criminal laws were originally written by an out-of-state contractor and have stood up very well. Alaska’s commercial law statutes, probate code and dozens of other laws are uniform statutes, written by the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. The Legislature should not hesitate to use Outside expertise here. Whatever the laws that are enacted, those new statutes will be microscoped by the very smartest lawyers Big Oil can hire.

And while we are engaged in this process, we need to ignore pretty much everything Sean Parnell says about it. WC suspects he won’t be governor when the laws WC is proposing are enacted. It’s going to take some time to get it done right. Parnell’s motives are highly suspect. At best, he has been criminally negligent in his due diligence before proposing his bill. At worst, he isn’t working for the people of Alaska.

WC again offers his thanks and appreciation to the majority caucus of the State Senate for calling out the Governor’s proposed law. But simply stopping a $2 billion giveaway doesn’t address the BUCIP. In fact, the work has just started.