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OUTSIDE AGITATORS

January 5, 2016

In my youth, I took part in peace rallies, working for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 as part of the “clean for Gene” group.  I was called an “outside agitator” and worse by those who disagreed with my beliefs.  Indeed, back then, “Law and Order” and “outside agitators” were almost always right wing pronouncements.

The recent takeover of an unoccupied building at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by armed men, from outside Oregon, protesting the jailing of two ranchers, is at the moment at a divide between a non-issue that went away quietly or a major conflict that will be remembered for decades.  Two things are immediately clear.  These are outside agitators and they broke several laws.

The facts are not yet clear, and I may be in error, unlike my detractors, who know everything with complete certainty.  The spark was the jailing (insufficient time) of a rancher and his son, who about a decade ago set fire to about 150 acres to remove invasive plants so that they could graze their cattle—on federal land—where they held a grazing lease.  Apparently one of the fires was set to cover up deer poaching.  The law requires a minimal sentence, much like drug use.  The lack of all the facts has not stopped people on social media from opining about government takeover of land, need to privatize all land, and let “the people” (at least of their political persuasion, not mine) run things. The ranchers themselves voluntarily reported to jail and did not want publicity, according to their lawyer.  That didn’t stop the mob from singing “Amazing Grace” in front of their house, proving Obama’s famous comment about America’s Red Crescent “Their guns and their religion,” which while a political faux pas, was and is dead right. Nevertheless, the insurgents felt this was unfair and occupied a building on the Refuge. Cliven Bundy’s son (Bundy had a standoff against the Feds 2 years ago about failure to pay $1 million in grazing fees.  For fear of bloodshed, the Feds backed down) said they were prepared to stay there for “years.”  .

I’ve been to nearby Burns, Oregon, and I can’t imagine staying for years in Malheur.  Obviously, somebody is supporting these people, since most of us have to make money to take time off, especially to destroy the federal government.  Maybe the money came from the million Bundy’s dad saved on not paying grazing fees for putting his cattle on my land.  Yes, my land.  And that is what I am concerned about.  We lease federal lands so that ranchers can run cattle on it.  Then if anything happens to the cattle, like predation, they want compensation from we the people.  Twenty-five years ago, in Arizona, one of these ranchers trapped and killed bears that were allegedly killing his cattle on federal land.  My wife and I became vegetarian on the spot.  Still are.

Mind you, the ranchers in the Malpai Borderlands Group work well with The Nature Conservancy, and their joint efforts should serve as a model, not Bundy’s Tea Party-no negotiation group, which doesn’t work, because saying no and not yielding one point doesn’t work in a pluralistic society.

More than half the land in America’s West is federally owned, and since I am part of the government, it is partly my land, too.  There is a lot of resentment of land being “locked up” as wilderness when it can be logged, mined, snowmobiled, hunted, jet skied, regular skied, or otherwise used to make money.  People use public lands—my land as much as theirs—to make money, often off people like me.

The idea that we “lock this land up,” is false, but like so much of what my detractors say, it is a catch phrase, to be repeated often enough so it is treated as fact.  We hold this land in reserve for those whose lives have yet to begin.  We hold it in reserve so we will still have it.  Should we auction it all off to the highest bidder, who knows where it will go?  I do know what happens when nearly all the land is privatized.  It’s called Texas, where 2% of the land is federally owned.

When I saw the Hill Country, I was dismayed at all the fencing.  The restrictions aren’t just a Texan issue, however. Here in Oregon, a rancher sold a huge ranch to a Chicago man, who closed all the trails that were once accessible to the public.  That would be you and me.  Lack of access to places that we used to go to are the first result of privatization of public lands.  Those are the people who are locking land away, not the feds.  Privatize the land, and those with money get it. So, unless one is a millionaire, few will get land, certainly not the guy who can barely pay his mortgage, take care of his kids, pay for his F-350 and the ammo he uses. I wonder why that guy hasn’t yet figured out that the Republican party is using him.

Last century, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness came close to being privatized.  It would have allowed resorts, dammed waterfalls, logged everything, and one of the great wildernesses in this country—the most visited today—would have been lost.  If we privatize the Grand Canyon, uranium mining will occur, and people will no longer have the experience of total quiet, miles from the nearest person, in a civilization where such quiet is a rarity.  I’ve experienced these wonders and want others to do so as well.

If we privatize Malheur, that will be the end of a special place for wildlife.  Oh, cattle ranchers—some, anyway—will make more money, although not much, because grazing fees are dirt cheap to begin with.  Tell me, Mr. Bundy, what happens when an ORV or a snowmobile cuts a fence containing somebody’s cattle?  Who is going to adjudicate?  If they think that won’t happen, they are too dumb to own a firearm.  They may feel that progressives like me don’t have a right to visit some of these places.  What about future generations?  Do we get booted out of the country?  Is that what America is about?

Answer:  I think so.  The Far Right has money and buys and cheats its way to power.  We are headed for an oligarchy like Russia, with the same results.

I want Malheur under a total, quiet siege.  Keep the media in Burns.  The less coverage, the less these guys can strut on national news. No power, no water, no food, no utilities, no medical care.  Nothing. If one wishes to give up his weapon and leave, he may do so.  He may be subject to a misdemeanor, but I just want him gone.  Nothing else should be allowed in or out, until everybody leaves.  These guys are terrorists, using terror— numbers and their weapons—to take over federal land and push for overthrow of the government.  That is terrorism, regardless of where they come from Algeria or Austin, Libya or Lubbock, Medina or Missoula, Baghdad or Boise, Yemen or Yreka.

Hopefully, this will not be another Waco, which spawned Oklahoma City, just like the Iraq War ultimately helped spawn ISIS. If people bombed your innocent family, killing all of them, might you consider terrorism as a reasonable response?  The “$1.7 billion” war, “Shock and Awe,” and “Mission Accomplished” have finally came home to roost.

It’s time to stand up to right wing terrorism and keep public land public. The government is not a nebulous entity.  It is we.

Finally, language matters.  This is not a militia.  This is terrorism.

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HIKING THROUGH THE SOLAR SYSTEM

January 4, 2016

The Obsidians are a hiking club in Eugene sponsoring hikes, climbs, bike trips, snowshoe and cross-country trips, bus trips to distant parks, a summer camp with a week of day hikes and catered meals, and … in town hikes.

I took my first hike with the club about a month after I arrived, after 3 hikes qualifying for membership.  One of the officers wanted me to lead hikes right away, but I insisted I had to know a trail before I organized and took people to an area.  Three months after a summer of exploring  the central Cascade foothills, scores of hikes, I led my first one.

My twenty-eighth hike as a leader wasn’t to Collier Cone, Obsidian Loop, Larison Rock, or Browder Ridge.  It was a hike in town, walking the one to one billion scale model of the solar system.  I got the idea one day while strolling through Alton Baker Park, where the Sun, a 4 foot high model, stood.  Why not do a 7.5 mile hike through the scale model of the solar system?

And so, on a chilly New Years’ Eve Day morning, a dozen people who had signed up for the hike and I began our walk near the duck ponds at the western edge of the park, near the Willamette River.  I had reviewed the facts about the planets: size, day length, orbital period, presence/absence of a magnetic field, temperature, but when I reached the Mars post, the first stop, I put the notes away. I wasn’t sure what I would do, but I wasn’t going to recite facts.

We began at Mars, not Mercury, because the post was nearest where we parked, I wanted to have the hike move in more or less a straight line, and we were parked closest to Mars.

I quickly realized I was at a daylight star party, except the stars were planets, and I didn’t have a telescope.  Everything else was the same.  I was teaching to several interested adults near me.  Earth-Moon was second on the walk, and I discussed the size of the Earth, far smaller than a marble at this scale, and its 150 meter or nearly 500 foot distance from the Sun.  I showed the vast emptiness of the solar system, how far we were from Mars, and how little was in our neighborhood.

Mercury has the day where the Sun rises, gets high in the sky and then sets.  Really must be something to see.  I mentioned while many thought Mercury was difficult to see, there are times it is easy.  Indeed, I saw it from downtown Chicago one night years ago.

I remembered  that Venus has no magnetic field but instead spoke of the resonance between 5 passages of Venus by Earth, 584 days apart, and how that time is almost exactly 8 Earth years.  I told them of the transits of Venus I observed in 2004 and 2012.  I said transits were so rare that in 2012 the grandchildren of a newborn baby, whose mother held him up to the eyepiece, might see the next one if they lived long enough.

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Transit of Venus, 5 June 2012

When we reached the yellow large ball that marked the Sun, I spoke of how the Sun generated heat through nuclear fusion, producing prodigious amounts of helium every second from fusing hydrogen, yet would still exist for many more billions of years. I talked about fusion of helium into other elements, all the way to iron, in larger stars, where fusion no longer gave off energy, and the star had a problem, because gravity pulling in and heat expanding no longer balanced each other.  The resulting collapse formed all the other elements; the presence of iron in our blood, magnesium in chlorophyll, silicon on the sand we walk on were all parts of nuclear fusion from a star that existed prior to our Sun.

We next crossed the Willamette and walked on the South Bank trail.  Shortly, we reached Jupiter, and I talked about the Galilean Moons, how I once saw them covered by the waning crescent Moon, reappearing one by one as the Moon slowly moved.  I told them about the dark spots caused by the collision of Shoemaker-Levy comet on Jupiter in 1994, and a time I saw Jupiter in daylight.  I forgot to mention the special night I saw Jupiter, a meteor and lightning flash all at the same time, 25 years ago.  When one observes the night sky, there are many such surprising gifts.

Saturn was a little more than a half mile further away. I mentioned the rings, how they could open up part way, viewed from Earth, but could also be edge-on.  I was asked if we could see the rings from directly over Saturn.  Sadly, we cannot.  Twenty years ago, I showed people Saturn with edge-on rings at a non-astronomy conference I attended at Palm Desert, California.  I spent three nights in a parking lot with my telescope, each night having more and more people, until the final night I had a steady line of 40 waiting patiently.  I don’t remember what I learned at the conference, but I never forgot the nights outside.  I suspect many of those who looked through the eyepiece felt the same way.

I also talked about the 28 Sagittarius-Saturn occultation in July 1989, when Saturn passed in front of the star, which appeared to move through the ringlets, only 20 meters wide, but each band clearly discernible as I watched Saturn move—yes, I saw it move—until the star was between Saturn and the innermost ring, a truly once in a lifetime sighting.  I was in my element now.  The temperature had risen, I was not lecturing but rather discussing how the planets affected my life, my observing, and were part of me.

Uranus rolls around the Sun, its axis directly pointing at the star.  I wore a button in 1986, 30 years ago, commemorating the arrival of Voyager 2 at the planet.  Voyager 2 took the Grand Tour, money well spent, NASA arguably at its best, as the craft used the planets as a slingshot, a close fly-by of Jupiter, using Jupiter’s gravity to go to Saturn, using another gravity assist to go to Uranus. I remember the ice rilles on Miranda, one of the moons, and the gas clouds of Uranus itself.

A mile later, we reached Neptune, 2.8 miles from the Sun, its 165 year orbit meaning it moved only 2 feet a day at this scale.  My memory was Neptune All Night, the show on a late August evening in 1989, when I observed Neptune while listening to the discussion of what was being sent back by the spacecraft.  Neptune had a big dark spot and rings.  I also remember the high winds reported on Neptune, the geysers on Triton, completely unexpected, the way all the visits to all the planets revealed the unexpected.

My hike through the solar system was not at all what I expected.  I hope to repeat it annually.

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WEARING ANOTHER’S STRIPES

December 31, 2015

“Everything is going to be OK, Mr. Roberts!”  the young man ran in to the hospital room where I was examining Mr. Roberts and just as quickly left.

My first thought was, “Who was that guy?”  My second thought was that Mr. Roberts was most assuredly not going to be “OK” for the near future, maybe never.  I was just an intern, years ago, and had to evaluate the unfortunate man who had a large stroke involving the dominant hemisphere, middle cerebral artery territory, affecting expressive and receptive speech and paralyzing his right side.  At least Mr. Roberts didn’t understand the optimistic words.

The “intruder” was a physician’s assistant for a well-known local internist and was busy writing orders when I returned to the nursing station.  Because he worked for a senior physician, he made himself important by association.  Stripes are what nautical and airline officers wear on their sleeves or shoulders. Stripes should not be transferrable, but a lot of people think they are.

I stayed quiet that day; as an intern, I was at the bottom of the hospital pecking order, and the PA was “wearing the stripes” of the doctor for whom he worked.  My training was more than his, I was working longer hours than he (nobody worked longer hours than interns in those days), but length of training, knowledge and hours worked stood little chance against a forceful, sure of himself individual.  I would see that in spades with the surgeons with whom I would deal.  There was no way I would have told the PA that Mr. Roberts had a long, difficult road ahead of him.

A month later, that longest year of my life, I found that the OR Nurse for cardiac surgery wore the stripes of the two cardiac surgeons for whom she worked.  Every intern had to spend time on the cardiac surgery service. The pair made my 24 day rotation hell.  The two fed off each other, driving me to tears on one occasion, classic physician behavior back then that is slowly dying out as the old guard finally moves on.  I was a physician, not yet licensed to be sure, but I didn’t deserve to be treated as the “hired help,” either.  The two were equal opportunity nasty to everybody; they threw instruments, hit me on the wrist with an instrument if I weren’t holding it properly, demanded I hold a retractor better, when I couldn’t see what I was doing, and thanked me only 5 times on the 12 multi-hour cases which I helped them.  I found I could fight back with my intellect, because I was able to correctly answer every anatomy question they posed during a case, often with a bored tone of voice that was my passive-aggressive way to say, “Can’t you do better than that?”

One day, I finally had one of those rare moments in life where I said exactly the right words at the right time, the “Perfect Squelch.”  I was holding a hemostat, a clamp, and my thumb was too far through the handle.  “SMITTY!” the senior surgeon shouted.  (I hated that name).  “DON’T HOLD YOUR INSTRUMENTS LIKE THAT!!! YOU DON’T HOLD YOUR SILVERWARE LIKE THAT, DO YOU?”

I quietly replied, “Dr. Maloney, I don’t use silverware.  I eat with my fingers.”  Other than Dr. Maloney’s unsuccessful attempt to comment, the room remained silent the rest of the case.

Their nurse treated me as the hired help, too.  While I didn’t like how she looked at me, her mannerisms or her tone of voice. I just told myself that my time as an intern wouldn’t last forever.  Every day was another 0.27% gone.  I wonder how she was treated by the surgeons themselves.  One subsequently had a nervous breakdown, and I actually felt sorry for him.  He was an arrogant jerk, but his life was going south and mine was not.

Wearing the stripes literally came to pass the following two years, when I was in the Navy.  The concept of the wife of the Captain being in charge of the other wives was “wearing his stripes.” Some women used their power well, however, perhaps supporting a pregnant wife of a Navy Ensign, her officer-husband overseas for 8 months, and needing help.  Others tended to act as their husbands, only that backfired if a wife was a professional with her own career and quite capable of living independently from her husband if she had to.  Like mine.

Over the years, I have seen others wearing the stripes.  I’ve seen them on the face or heard it in the voice of an Executive Secretary or a doctor’s nurse.  It was a very clear, “my boss has a lot of power, so therefore I have it, too.”  Had I more interpersonal skills, I would have learned to cultivate these people so that they would look forward to hearing from me and do things that I wanted.  Alas, I did not have such skills.  I called things as I saw them, and that wasn’t always popular.

I came by my attitudes honestly.  My father was once superintendent of schools, responsible for everything in the district. Not everything he did was popular; indeed, we frequently got phone calls at various hours, since our number was in the directory.  One night, I heard my mother on the phone in my parents’ bedroom, a place I never went.  Sound travels, however, and I couldn’t help but overhear her say something along the lines of “That’s not my job, and I am not going to listen to your tone of voice any longer.  Good-by.”  She hung up.  When she left the bedroom, she saw me.  I don’t remember the look on her face, but I never forgot her words.

“Your father is getting paid to do this.  I’m not.”

She might easily have said, “He can wear his own goddamn stripes.”

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BIG GOVERNMENT STRIKES AGAIN

December 26, 2015

Big government is again stepping in and regulating our right to have a good time.  More specifically, they are blocking progress, for we may not easily have package delivery to our door from on high.  If they would only let people alone, things would be fine, because people invariably do the right thing.  The market tells us so.

Yes, drone regulation is upon us.  Drones can now be tracked to their owner.  They have to be, because there have been issues with unregulated drones that couldn’t be tracked.  I knew it would happen.  Drones were interfering with civilian aviation, 237 instances of a drone’s coming with 200 feet of a manned aircraft in the first nine months this year.  An aircraft on final approach moves 200 feet in less than a second.  Ninety per cent of the incidents occurred above 400 feet, the legal limit for drones.  Regulation helps, but people still find ways around rules. I guess it is like  “leash your dog”; that rule is for other people, not for your special drone or dog.  Drones have interfered with wildland firefighting by having so many over a fire at one time that air tankers couldn’t safely drop their loads.

Lack of sufficient regulation in the financial industry almost brought down the world’s economy.  Turns out that a lot of NINJA mortgages were bogus, and when the mortgages weren’t paid, the whole house of paper came tumbling down, as did the economy.  Solution?  Roll back regulations further.  Wow.  Do I move to Canada now or wait?

This, Sens. Paul, Cruz, Rubio, Graham, and every other anti-government crusader, is why we need regulation.  I don’t want people to die unnecessarily; I really don’t want them to die because some arrogant jerk flew his drone where it shouldn’t have been flown, like into a jet engine, causing a crash.  Let me state my point succinctly, before I give more examples.

PEOPLE CAN’T BE TRUSTED TO SELF-REGULATE.

Yes, many regulations are annoying.  Those who went to Louisiana to help out after Katrina had to go through a daylong course on sexual harassment, when people needed urgent help. Smart people know when to bend rules, like no chain saws in the wilderness, when a 30 million tree blowdown in 1999 trapped many canoeists and lives were at stake.  Chain saws were brought in.

Even with regulations, we have problems with our food supply.  We have E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and other outbreaks. Without such regulations, what would we have, a microbial free for all?  Market choice?  It might do some of these senators good to get food poisoning.  Maybe they would understand.  If the signs in restrooms makes one person a day wash his hands, it is still better.  Does it prevent disease?  I don’t know: It’s difficult to count non-events.  It does not make regulation any less valid.

What about medical care?  I practiced in a hospital where we had a neurosurgeon with bad outcomes.  Periodically, somebody complained, a partner of mine had to investigate. When he finished, he was accused of trying to badmouth the competition.  What if you were a patient from out of town and didn’t know the quality of care?  Come to think of it, how do you know, anyway?  It’s bad enough to have a nasty disease or problem—I’ve been there.  It’s reassuring to know that the physician taking care of you has had adequate training to do what you need. This doesn’t just happen by chance, you know.  It requires regulation, and the same physicians who hated “administration” couldn’t get enough of us administrators involved when someone was practicing in their turf.

What about the elderly who get ripped off by non-licensed financial planners and lose thousands of dollars?  Is that market forces?  It’s fortunate that I wasn’t given regulatory authority over Wall Street.  I would have started with a 0.125% tax on all transactions—both sides— effective immediately. I would have taxed all bonuses at 80% to limit what people made for moving money around, rather than doing something more useful, like say instilling the love of reading, math, music, or art into the lives of children.  And I would have taxed income over $2 million at 80%, same reason, and I’d remove the cap on deductions for Social Security.  Wealth transfer?  You bet. Until we have a way to control our population and teach them good money managing skills, we can’t have people dying from lack of money to get medical care or put a roof over their head. Some who get that money are lazy slobs.  Yes.  But far, far more are single mothers with children, mothers who bore children because they didn’t have access to family planning, which the Republicans want to ban. Care for the poor, isn’t that what religion taught you?

Finally, the only instance I know where a few bad apples have not ruined something for the many is the matter of responsible gun ownership. California and Washington, with strict rules on gun ownership, have 30% fewer gun deaths per 100,000 than the other Western states.  Oregon, with somewhat strict rules, has fewer as well.  The common ground for those 3 states is universal background checks.  The authors were careful not to say causal, but there appears to be no other cause.

Almost certainly, fewer guns lead to fewer suicides. This happened dramatically in Australia with a buyback of perhaps 20% of privately owned guns.  Suicide rates by firearms fell 57%.  Suicide by gun requires minimal thought and a quick action which is almost always fatal.  Pills are less effective.  If I wrote an op-ed about this subject, almost certainly somebody, anonymous, of course, would write, ”let them kill themselves,” an incredibly insensitive comment which by itself should disqualify that person from owning a firearm.  Mind you, I don’t believe anything will change. Gun sales are increasing at a time when I continue to avoid gun ownership.  Afraid of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?  Sure.  But absence of a gun in the house lessens my risk of death significantly.  Guns have to be locked up to be safe; unlocking them and storing them by a bed is to me a bad idea.  A guy answered the phone one night and shot off his ear.  Yes.

Good guys with guns?  Jimmy Hatch, a Navy SEAL, writes eloquently why that is a bad idea.  He has been in many gunfights and describes the confusion one faces in one.  He concludes good guys with guns are far more likely to cause more deaths in these situations.

Good thing I’m not in charge.  I would regulate Wall Street.  I’d require software that would shut down a drone that was more than 400 feet in the air, and fine the owner.  I would pull a Gromyko on guns, for Gromyko was the master at getting what he wanted:  Ask for something outrageous, complain throughout every part of the negotiations, and complain bitterly about the result, too, how much one gave away.

Gromyko got what he wanted all along, simultaneously laying a guilt trip on the other side.  Brilliant.

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I’D BET MONEY ON IT

December 20, 2015

In the summer of 2014, an Oregon snowmobile club got the go ahead to do trail maintenance in the National Forest.  Unfortunately, the leader of the club didn’t read the whole permit.

That was his first mistake.

The club rented equipment, paid for in part by monies from the gas tax snowmobilers and the rest of us, people like me, pay, and went to work, without direct Forest Service oversight.  That was the second mistake.  The result was an environmental mess over 31 miles of trails.  Trees were knocked over with roots pulled up, culverts destroyed, dirt, brush, rocks and trees shoveled on to roads, damage estimated at well over $250,000.  The Club is getting off scot-free, because it was unintended damage.  Bull.  They never told the Forest Service what they had done. I’d bet money that they intended to do exactly what they did.  They knocked over culverts.  That is not trail maintenance.  They piled refuse in a road.  That is not trail maintenance. The Oregon State Snowmobiling Association (OSSA) states that their volunteer program is a national “model.”  Some model.  Two years earlier, the same club pushed over trees at a Sno-Tel park. This is a trend. I blame the Forest Service for lack of oversight, but bad apples reflect on snowmobilers.  OSSA should be appalled.  The club ought to be disbanded.

If OSSA wants a national model for volunteer work, they should talk to my friends Erv and Sandra who work all over the West every year as volunteers.  They are a model.

The land scars were first felt to be due to rogue logging, until “trail maintenance” was remembered.  OSSA says land in Oregon is being “locked up as wilderness,” when there are 6000 miles of snowmobile trails in the state and Oregon ranks ninth among eleven western states in acreage devoted to wilderness. We have less wilderness as a percentage than Idaho.  Do we have to have loud and polluting machines everywhere?  I don’t care that noise abatement has improved, the machines are loud, and some of us go into the woods to get away from all manmade noise. I don’t care that pollution has improved, it is still pollution, and the fact air quality has never been affected by snowmobiles is due to a different definition of air quality that is not relevant to the woods.  People have a right to snowmobile—responsibly.  I have a right to untrammeled wilderness, and my right is not less than theirs.

For the record, I am an average volunteer who occasionally does trail maintenance in Eugene, where it is very clear what we can and cannot do.  We work closely with the Parks and Outdoor Spaces to plant trees, channel water, clean off bridges, and whatever they ask us to do.  We save them money by our presence.  They do not give us motorized vehicles to use.  They do give us detailed instructions, which our leader reads.   Every word.

The central Oregon group did not. They took a lot of money to damage an area that can never be fully restored.  Congressman Greg Walden said that we didn’t have resources at a national level to do all the trail maintenance that needed to be done.

Greg, you are dead wrong.  We have plenty of resources, but your party stands in the way of anything that smacks of stewardship for the land.  I’d bet money on it.  The Forest Service in 2012 had a backlog of $314 million plus $200 million for annual upkeep.  Don’t give me the “we don’t have the money” bit.  We have the money to throw at contractors in war zones, we just don’t think those who are stewards of our land are worth much. By the way, if we spent money hiring enough people with good equipment, we could have a Forest Service that really “cares for the land and serves people.”  It would create JOBS, Greg, although not paying what you make.  I’ve volunteered with the Forest Service.  Perhaps you should, too, Greg.  Legislate mandatory national service that includes trail maintenance, fund the Forest Service adequately to supervise these people, and we’d have better trails and less unemployment.  Your job is only 116 days a year.  Work a bit more, will you?  Do something for the country, for once. Stop getting in the way, stop voting in a bloc, and heed the late Paul Wellstone’s words:  “Politics isn’t about big money or power games; it’s about the improvement of people’s lives.”  Grow a spine.

No, I don’t think the snowmobile club members should go to jail, despite their destroying a lot of MY land by renting 15 ton equipment and having a good time knocking down trees and widening trails.  Do I know they were having a good time?  No, I don’t.  But I would bet money they were partying out there, drinking, making snide comments about environmentalists and the Forest Service, while they were destroying part of the United States.  Yes, I would bet money on it.

I’d demand that they pay for the damage.  Sell their snowmobiles, their trucks and their trailers, if they have to.   As it stands now, the Forest Service has asked the clubs involved to pay $35,000.  Asked.  I’d bet money that’s pocket change.  If they didn’t pony up, I’d saddle OSSA for the whole damn thing.  They have the money.  After all, they brag on their Web page how snowmobiling requires more outlay for equipment rather than $100-$200 for other uses—you know, like cross country skiing or snowshoeing, where people have to actually expend some effort.  I’ve taken people on Cascade hikes and waived the $5 fee for a non-member, along with the gas charge for our carpooling.  Their toys pollute air with noise and fumes, their users violate private property and scare animals, and yes, I hold them responsible for the actions of a few.  That’s the way of my world.  Clean up voluntarily or through regulation.  Take your pick.

I’ve seen good trail maintenance by the Disciples of Dirt mountain bikers on the Larison Rock trail.  They cut erosion and made the trail suitable for both mountain bikes and hikers.  I’ve seen what the High Cascade Forest Volunteers can do clearing downed trees on Maxwell Butte in early season.

Snowmobilers have a right to use the woods. I wonder if they feel I have a right to go into quiet wilderness, where there are no machines and a person has to do all the work.

They didn’t have the right to destroy the forest.  If a liberal environmentalist did one-thousandth the damage the snowmobile club did (that would be trashing 160 feet of trail), it would be on national news, Rush Limbaugh would have apoplexy, and the Republicans would vote to ban the Sierra Club.

I’d bet money on it.

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REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

December 14, 2015

Whoever sows injustice reaps calamity, and the rod they wield in fury will be broken.

Proverbs 22:8

Many Republicans are in a tizzy these days, because Donald Trump won’t go away, each week saying something more and more outlandish.  I’m reading conservative columnists, because they are attacking Trump and not the Democrats.  How refreshing.

What strikes me most about Trump, however, is he never apologizes. He’s never wrong.  On the other hand, he is a candidate of a party that is never wrong on any issue, be it the climate, ISIS, the economy, immigration, or education. The Republicans sowed the seeds of never being wrong, never compromising, and never apologizing, and now they are reaping the whirlwind of a campaign that they can’t control.

We should all be worried about Trump, because the guy is electable.  Hillary Clinton has proven herself to be a poor campaigner and has more baggage than the Texan who shared a French train with us, who had to stand between two cars for four hours, because his wife’s huge pink suitcases wouldn’t fit in the overhead.

Many of the young will be upset that Bernie Sanders didn’t win, and they may stay home.  I had hoped we had learned a big lesson from Nader.  A lot of those who ought to vote Democratic for the next five generations—beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, Medicare, Gay Rights—may stay home. There are those who bag it because it is becoming more difficult to vote rather than less.  There are others who now have to bring photo IDs, which cost money, on the basis on non-existent voter fraud, and now the Republicans are floating the idea of having Congress represent the voters rather than the people, which will give rural America, red as a beet, disproportionate influence.  We should have a national holiday weekend just to give people time to vote, and yet hours are being cut.

The Republicans sought the Evangelical vote, because the Democrats were in favor of abortion, civil rights, gay rights, and other social causes that the Evangelicals wouldn’t support.  The megachurches supported the Far Right, were able to do so without tax consequences, their leaders invited to prayer breakfasts, and the Republicans were able to capture the “family values” group, despite a high number of divorces and scandals in high placed Republicans.

When the Tea Party came into existence, the Republicans sought their support too, for here was a group that had rabid members and hated the President.  The Tea Party was well organized, and after the fiery debates over the Affordable Care Act, were able to take over Congress, winning 63 new seats.  They may have changed Congress for a generation, much as Civil Rights lost the South probably permanently, except for a few retiree states.

The Tea Party was a game changer, and contrary to what I read now, they are still a powerful force in the country today.  They are a bunch of boors.  One yelled “Liar” in the middle of a State of the Union speech. One simply does not do that.  Congress had always worked by compromise and politeness until these people appeared.They have proven to be like Trump, non-apologetic, against everything Obama has tried to do, unwilling to compromise on anything—much like the Dr. No I had to deal with in my medical director days—and have single-handedly shut down the government.  Only forty or so are in the House now, but their power is essentially that of 220.

When Boehner was Speaker, he used the “Hastert Rule,” named after a prior speaker, which means that no bill gets introduced unless the majority of the majority party agrees.  This renders Democrats ineffective.  The minority has no say.  No bill they write has a chance.  It is ironic that this year Mr. Hastert pled guilty to a hush money scheme that is still not clear what for, although I am betting on pedophilia.  We are therefore governing the House based on what one speaker—now felon—thought best years ago, which has limited severely the number of bills that we can pass.

The Tea Party convinced Boehner to shut down the government, costing several billion dollars and accomplishing nothing. We almost defaulted on our debts, and indeed our bond rating fell a notch, for the first time ever.  The Tea Party eventually caused Boehner to resign, and the first and second choices to succeed him appeared to have baggage of their own, forcing Paul Ryan to make a decision to take over, rather than to spend time with his family.

One would think with 246 representatives, somebody could have come forward to serve who might have been a great speaker.  But not if the Tea Party can stop anything they want.

Ryan is himself dangerous.  He doesn’t want to give “one red cent” to Planned Parenthood.  Being a good Catholic, I suspect his religious beliefs are getting in the way of the idea that having fewer children and planning when to have them would go a long ways to alleviating poverty within two  generations.  Fewer children would also decrease the number of abortions, but when one believes that anything greater than zero is wrong and should not be allowed to happen, options are limited.  Ryan wants to make Medicare a system of vouchers.  I can’t imagine the huge number of people on Medicare trying to make sense of vouchers and shop for the best coverage.  I’m 67 and a retired physician.  I have difficulty understanding the system.  What about an 85 year-old widow who isn’t thinking too clearly and doesn’t have a lot of money?  Does one really think this is what market choices is all about?

Lindsay Graham is the only contender in the Republican Party who has said that he will refuse to vote for Trump, should the latter become the nominee.  Not even Paul Ryan said that.  That speaks volumes about the Party.

The Republicans wooed the Evangelicals and then the Tea Party.  They did nothing for the Evangelicals and figured the Tea Party would do their bidding.  Instead, the Republican Party is being whipped around by the tail of the tiger they grabbed.  Trump is the leading contender, and he is threatening a third party run, currently supported by 68% of his supporters, very few of whom would likely vote Democratic.  The Republicans have sown hatred, bigotry, lack of compassion, lack of collegiality, and boorishness, and they are now reaping the whirlwind.

What the country will reap remains to be seen.  I am not optimistic.

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BOORISH 4.0

December 9, 2015

I had just figured out, using calculus, the rate in radians per second necessary for a camera to follow an ascending rocket.  The student was thrilled, and I was frankly amazed.  I hadn’t done a problem like that in 50 years, and I walked out of the community college math lab that afternoon satisfied after 5 hours of helping several dozen students.

The day soon worsened.

The first was a post on Facebook that my brother sent me.  It was a Christmas card from a Nevada Assemblywoman with her family: babies, kids, other adults, all dressed with red shirts, and all packing.  The weapons I think were listed in the card, but the print was small and my eyes aren’t very good.  A young boy was holding a semi-automatic.  All the others showed their weapons.

This is scary and incredibly tasteless, boorish, and during a holiday season, completely contrary to the teachings of Jesus, in whom I am sure these people believe.  It is child endangerment, for guns in the hands of children or near children are dangerous, and data support that.  I wrote my brother:  “Too many guns, too many kids, and too much red.”   It was appalling.

Then the evening news nailed me.  Mr. Trump was promoting a ban on all Muslims coming to the country; Mr. Cruz was saying the he would carpet bomb ISIS were he elected, wondering what color the sand would look like.  Red, Ted. From the blood of babies and women, too.

Fear sells.  And Americans have become a bunch of ‘fraidy cats.  Yep.  Land of the free, home of the ‘fraidy cat.  Did I mention the Assemblywoman was a good friend of Cliven Bundy, who bilked the federal government out of a few million in grazing fees and got away with it?  That’s my land, too, as much as it is his.  The feds caved, because it would have been a bad scene with many on both sides dead, the rebels martyrs.

Fear wins elections.

That is why Bush gained seats in Congress in 2002, re-elected in 2004.  Fear sells. Gun sales are high, and one of the most common ones bought now is an assault weapon.  There were 185,000 background checks on Black Friday, a record, to go along with 100 million mandated by the Brady Handgun Violence Bill of 1993, which began checks in 1998.  Americans are afraid of everything.  Shows like “24” played to this, The Weather Channel’s “It could happen tomorrow” also did, and there is a pervasive notion that seconds, literally seconds count for life and death.  All of us are a heartbeat away from disaster were it not for the “heroes” who surround us and will save us.  It isn’t true, and as a neurologist, I saw plenty of emergencies.

Sure, I’m afraid there will be a campus shooter, but I still volunteer, 70 miles from Umpqua.  I think it is more likely a car driven by a drunk driver will cross the center line and kill me.  One cut a car in half on Highway 34 a few days ago and killed a young woman.  That’s scary, but it doesn’t make the evening news.  Three young men died when their truck went off a Forest Service Road earlier this year.  I thought about them when I drove back from the Coast, near that road.  They were dead, I was alive.  I wondered how their family felt, first Christmas without them.  Wonder how the family feels of the two men killed, 4 miles apart, by a wacko kid who killed his parents, set the house ablaze, and drove wildly through Springfield and Eugene  One had just retired; the other was Christmas shopping.  No reason.  Dead.

I’m afraid of mountain lions when I hike solo in the woods.  But I am more afraid I will stumble upon a survivalist, a marijuana grower, or just a bunch of rednecks with some guns and an attitude.  That scares me, and it has nothing to do with ISIS.  Whatever else, the jihadists don’t know wilderness.  The rednecks do, although I could do without many trashing it everywhere they go.  I keep my eyes and ears open when I’m in the woods.  A friend told me how he was followed very, very closely by one of them in NorCal, causing him to turn around and quickly leave.  I would have, too.  One hiker down there, my age, was killed, his companion left for dead in the same place.  Guy in his cabin killed by a robber on the lam. Wrong place, wrong time.  Nothing to do with ISIS or Muslims.

Trump is playing the fear card, and Cruz will gain traction by his carpet bombing statement.  He didn’t say who was going to pay for this, because wars cost money.  The last one was promised to be $1.7 billion, but it turned out to be that every week for several years.  Maybe Mr. Cruz has that kind of money, but I don’t.  And unless somebody asks him, Mr. Cruz isn’t likely to say where is he is going to find the money. So I will ask:

Mr. Cruz, where are you going to get the money to carpet bomb ISIS?

The last war set the stage for ISIS, but our radicals don’t ever discuss  who invaded Iraq.  Bombing means planes get shot down, pilots captured or killed, their pictures filling the news media, everybody’s posting the picture of one of “our boys” and an outpouring of national ribbons and demands for prisoner release.  Next question:

Mr. Cruz, how many of our own men and women are you willing to sacrifice in order to do this?

Remember that not only do our troops die, but they get wounded, receive sub-optimal care in many instances, and are mustered out of the service, often becoming homeless.  Heroes fade fast.

And next:

Mr. Cruz, when you are president, will you allow the news media to cover the returning of our slain troops to Dover, unlike Mr. Bush?  By the way, do you know what state Dover is in?  That’s for the reader, too.  If you don’t, and you are American, look it up and do me a favor—be a little embarrassed if you didn’t know which state.  I grew up near there. Americans should know their country.

Since lack of an end strategy has hurt this country in both Vietnam and Iraq, I will ask another:

Mr. Cruz, how are we going to decide when to leave?

Because most people don’t like those who bomb them, I think the following needs also to be asked:

Mr. Cruz, do you think radicalization of young men and women might have something to do with the way we have conducted the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other places in the Middle East?  Put another way, Senator, do you think we might cause the radicalization we want to destroy?

It had been a long day in the math lab, and I had answered a lot of questions politely and accurately.  I think it is now time for me to ask a few and to ask for the same treatment, because I doubt the press will.

They won’t even focus on the fact that Ted Cruz is not a natural born citizen as I happen to define the term.

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CHRISTIE’S “FEELINGS”

December 8, 2015

Chris Christie was in the news again, stating that the climate has always changed, and he saw no crisis.  He wasn’t quoting any scientists about this, but he had a “feeling” that it wasn’t.  ISIS, on the other hand is a crisis.

What is ironic is that the existence of ISIS has a lot to do with climate change.  Syria is a dry country; from 1900 to 2005, six droughts occurred, and all lasted one season, with about a third of the normal rainfall.  From 2006-2010, four seasons of extensive drought occurred, which was unprecedented, leading to the displacement of 1.5 million people.  If I heard that, I must have forgotten it, but Syria was in the midst of a major upheaval in its economy before the recession which then led to the current situation.  Irrigation had not been completed, and addressing water shortages was poorly done.

The long range water outlook is not good for either Syria or the Middle East.  Had it not been for a change in the climate, that Governor Christie says is “the climate is always changing,” we might not have ISIS to deal with at all. Trust me, the US Defense Department believes in climate change and is actively trying to deal with a new reality when the Arctic is ice-free, and there are wars fought over fresh water.

Mind you, addressing climate change adequately is not going to happen.  That’s clear.  We have many vocal deniers, and I do fault the Associated Press for saying the proper term is “skeptics.”  No, a true skeptic will demand evidence and change his or her mind in the face of convincing evidence.  I will and have changed my mind in the face of convincing evidence.  The climate deniers I have known will not.  Ask for a margin of error or confidence, they will give either no answer or “100% confident,” which is impossible given the complexity of the atmosphere and one’s ability to understand all the factors.  What has been particularly pernicious has been the sowing of enough uncertainty that the average busy American thinks that the issue really isn’t settled and we shouldn’t change our lifestyles at all.  Gas mileage for cars should now average 60 mph, which I get on a 2003 Civic; instead, fuel economy languishes a bit over a third of that.

My computers have run 55.73 quadrillion points (that is 5, with 16 zeros after it) of climate models, as part of climatenetwork.net.  I am running Australia-New Zealand models that showed the Earth every 5 or 15 minutes for a few year period of interest. It’s something I can do right now to help the situation.  From these models, we know that the record October temperatures in Australia were 6 times as likely to have occurred because of global warming.  I know how complex these models are, which require up to 390 hours of computational time for each change a researcher does.  There are hundreds of these, changing variables of interest, in case emissions of CO2 decrease or methane increase, for example.  By doing this, we can make probabilistic statements about climate change vs. natural variability.  We know that up to a quarter of the severity of California’s drought is from climate change, and the least is still about 7%.  Notice the range of estimates, for uncertainty quantification is a big part of science.  Syria’s drought is less uncertain and almost clearly a result from climate change.  One drought on average every 17 years and then four straight years of drought is highly significant, meaning it is not a chance occurrence.  Something caused it with high probability, and we can quantitate that probability.

It is ironic that Hurricane Sandy, which devastated New Jersey, Christie’s home state, is part of  the new normal—storms that look the same as always but are not the same.   One of the things we have learned about global warming is that the ocean’s temperature has increased well below the surface, far further below than we thought.  That limits the atmospheric warming increase, but we have no idea what a deep warming of the ocean portends.  It may have been the reason Hurricane Patricia was so strong, because hurricanes require warm water, and the deeper the warm water goes in the ocean, the more the fuel for the hurricane.  We also don’t know what warmer oceans will do to the atmosphere over them.  The climate deniers don’t think there is a problem.  I think there is a problem; I just don’t know how it will manifest itself.  If I had a child or a grandchild, I would be very worried about their lives in a world whose climate is going to take a direction we have never seen as a species.  Put another way, if one has children and denies what is extremely likely, one is being unfair at best and cruel at worst to their progeny.

What good are models?  Indeed, I had one individual tell me to argue my case without using climate models.  What should I use?  Mr. Christie’s “feelings” that he knows he’s right?  Let’s look at feelings a little more.  Nate Silver runs fivethirtyeight.com, which predicts many events, including the elections.  In 2012, there were people who “had a feeling” how certain states would vote,  whereas Mr. Silver used weighting of polls based on past performance to make probabilistic determinations of how states would vote.  He wouldn’t say that North Carolina would be won by Romney; he said there was an 85% probability that it would be.  It was.  Silver got all the major contested states right; he got all the states right.  It wasn’t a feeling, it was statistics.  The others were dead wrong.  The “political sense” that Pennsylvania would go to Romney was completely erroneous.  Silver not only predicted it, his prediction of the popular vote percentage was almost completely accurate.

With weather models, we have extraordinarily high probabilities of knowing what is going to happen in the next 48-72 hours.  I don’t think we should be timing rainfall’s starting to the nearest minute or should give the probability of rain to the nearest per cent, but the idea of a major storm or heat wave can be seen by looking at the models.  Climate models aren’t perfect, but they are the best knowledge we have, and over decades, they are far more predictive than the weather forecasts.  All of the models are pointing towards a warmer Earth with consequences that are known and others that are not known.

I don’t know what is scarier to me, what will happen to the climate or the fact that the three major branches of government of the most powerful country on Earth will likely be controlled by those who believe that there is no problem at all.  They are wrong, they are foolish, they are arrogant, and they will be the cause of first the downfall of the country and then the species.

I’m sure I’ll be blamed, but I won’t be around to hear it.  The first steps of that have already occurred.

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ONLINE, ON COURSE

November 29, 2015

I received the following letters the past few weeks.  They made my day.

Thank you so much, I was struggling and your answer made it simple and understandable. UR GR8.

You are Amazing!

You have helped me in the past and always have accurate answers, I am so grateful you took your time out to help me today, thank you, I appreciate it so much!

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, you have written this in a way that I totally understand. I will differently (sic) praise you to all my friends and family. God Bless you,

What did I do to deserve these?

Reason for the first:

The area of a triangle is 30 sq in. The base of the triangle measures 2 in more than twice the height of the triangle. Find the measures of the base and height. 

The area of a triangle is (1/2)*base*height.  Remember that?  Therefore, the base*height must equal 60 for the area to be 30.  Let the height= x inches, then the base is 2x+2, two more than twice the height.  Then, 

x*(2x+2)=60, 2x^2+2x=60, and dividing by 2, x^2+x=30.  We can write that as x^2+x-30=0 and factor it as (x+6)(x-5)=0.  That is 0 if x=-6 (not possible for a length) or if x=5.  So, the base is 5 inches and the height is 2(5)+2, or 12 inches.

For the last comment,  I answered the following, taking about a minute in my head, writing it down as I thought.

Write the slope-intercept equation for the line that passes through (-12, 10) and is perpendicular to 4x + 6y = 3. 

One gets the slope first by rewriting the equation as 6y=-4x+3 and dividing by 6 to get y=-(2/3)x+1/2.  The slope is -2/3. The perpendicular line has a negative reciprocal slope.  Turn the fraction over (-3/2) and change the sign (3/2).  That is the slope of the perpendicular line.   Using the point slope formula where we know the slope and a point, x=-12, y=10, y-y1= (3/2) (x-x1).  That is y-10=(3/2)(x+12).  This becomes y-10=(3/2)x+18, and finally y=(3/2)x+28.  Also, y=mx+b, so 10=(3/2)((-12)+b.  That is 10=-18+b, so b=28.  Both methods work; the more ways one knows, the more ways to explain it to students.  One of the ways is likely to stick.

For the one who called me amazing?

Find the accumulated value on an investment of $15,000.00 for 9 years at an interest rate of 11% if the money is compounded 

a) Semi- annually b) Quarterly c) Monthly d) Continuously 

 Here, one uses the formula 

Principal=Starting Principal{1+ rate/compounding per year} raised to (the number of years*compounding per year). P=Po{1+r/t}^nt.  Semi-annual is P=Po{1+(0.11/2)}^18, because it compounds twice a year and there are nine years.  This is $39,322.  For continuously compounding, it is easier, P=Po*e^rt.  e^rt= e^(0.99), because 9*11%=0.99.  Po*e^0.99=$40,368.52.  Continuously compounding gives you more money, although the difference between it and monthly is only $200 less than continuously.  The last formula allows one to prove that the doubling time of money in years is 70 (or 72, which is easier to work with) divided by the interest rate in per cent.  I grew up in the age before calculators, and we had to do this by logs.  On a calculator, it takes about 15 seconds. Dividing 72 by 11 gives a doubling time of about 6 1/2 years, so $15,000 should double once and be well on its way to doing it again.  The answer makes sense.

This is an online math help site.  More than 2000 tutors take part, some of whom have solved one problem, one nearly 70,000.  I’ve solved 2000.  About one in four thanks me.  That’s nice.

Several tutors offer their services for pay, $1 per answer, $2-$5 to show the work.  I do it to relax.  Yes, relax.  This stuff is fun for me, and I have learned the easier the problem for me, the more grateful people tend to be.  I don’t need to hear anything, unless my answer is wrong or not understandable.  I’m there to help.  I don’t know names; I do know I have helped parents help their children.

I’ve learned much.  It has been a great review of my statistics, I now deal with ellipses better, and I understand geometric series better than I ever have before.

I usually want a challenge, so I choose what I want to solve.  I have a big advantage:  I grew up in the era of no Internet, Chemical Rubber Company tables of integrals, no calculators, only log tables to do complex calculations.  In other words, I learned math from first principles, from the ground up.  Yes, it helps to have a genetic ability to do this stuff.  I can’t play the violin, but I can find the vertex of a parabola mentally and write it in three different forms.  Kids need someone to help them understand how to do it, not in their head, but to allow them to understand these and similar problems.

The current list has perhaps 50 problems, and I often work down it until I find a problem I feel like doing.  If interested, I go to the list of unsolved problems.  Last I checked, statistics had about 40,000.  A lot of those are tough, and if I don’t have pen or paper around, I don’t do them.

When I tutor at the community college, I answer algebra questions online while waiting for non-virtual students to ask for help.  I guess I am volunteering, but I am having a lot of fun.  It’s nice to lay out quickly an answer in simple form for a person who is struggling.

The other day at the CC, I was asked to go into the higher level math room to help out.  That was a compliment, because I was felt to be good enough to help out there. I’m the go-to guy for statistics.  The other tutors are really smart, yet all of us at one time or another have trouble with something.  I may struggle at the high levels, but I often find myself pulling stuff out of the air from the past and making sense out of it.  Or better yet, I ask a student where he got a specific term in an equation.  The student looks puzzled then suddenly says, “Oh, wow, I didn’t see that before.  OK, I understand.  Thanks a lot.”  And he leaves.

I hadn’t a clue how to solve the problem, but I think I helped him.

Math is mentally taxing.  After doing about a dozen problems, I take a break.  It helps me later solve troublesome problems.  In the math lab, I have concentrated so deeply that one day when I walked out of the room, I forgot whether it was Tuesday or Friday.

I think the absent-minded professor was probably working overtime on a difficult problem.

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WE THE GOVERNMENT

November 15, 2015

There is a mouse problem at the barn where my wife spends a week or two every month with her horses.  Much as she loves animals, she does not want mice eating the feed, and there are too few cats there for too many mice.

When she went to the local feed store, looking for a certain poison, the clerk told her it was no longer present.  “The government won’t let you have it any more,” the man said,

“We are the government,” my wife replied.

The reason for not selling the poison is that we discovered that mice killed by it became food for raptors, which died after eating the carrion.  We banned DDT in 1972, because it concentrated in the fat of eagles, made their eggshells thinner, breaking before hatching.  After we stopped using DDT, the population recovered.  You didn’t think manufacturers of DDT were going to voluntarily stop selling it, did you?  That’s Ayn Rand’s world, not mine.  We took lead out of paint in 1978 because it is a neurotoxin, especially in children.  We used to have leaded gasoline.  Cars back then ran better with tetraethyl lead, but they run better now with unleaded gas.  California banned lead in gasoline in 1992, the rest of the country in 1996.  The percent of children with high lead levels has decreased from 7.6% to 0.5% since 1997.  That’s not due to the oil or auto industry demanding the removal of lead from gasoline. That is we the government, we the people, telling them to do so, improving public health.

Oh, Robert Kehoe, medical head of the Ethyl Corporation, helped keep lead in gasoline for 40 years.  In 1943, when research showed that children with elevated blood lead levels had behavioral disorders, the powerful corporation threatened to sue and the research stopped.  Kehoe argued lead occurs naturally, the body could deal with it, and thresholds for lead toxicity were far above what body levels were. That sounds a lot like arguments I hear against global warming.  In fact, Kehoe’s upper limits for lead toxicity were 80 micrograms/100ml, when current upper limits survived Reagan’s anti-regulation policy and are 10 micrograms/100ml.   We have smarter kids and maybe less crime, since there is a remarkable correlation between per cent with high lead levels and crime rates.

In 1937, S.E. Massengill Company marketed Elixir Sulfanilamide without alcohol.  Their chemist dissolved the product in diethylene glycol (DEG) (similar to antifreeze) and added raspberry flavoring.  DEG causes kidney failure, but in 1937, few, including the chemist, knew that. One hundred seven died, many of them children, and the outcry caused Congress to pass the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which required companies to perform animal safety tests on proposed new drugs and submit the data to the FDA before being allowed to market the products.  Massengill said, “We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results. I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.” The chemist felt differently.  He committed suicide before trial.

A young researcher, Frances Kelsey, was involved in the DEG studies.  Dr. Kelsey later stopped the use of thalidomide in the US, saving untold numbers of American children from being born with phocomelia, or no limbs.  Government meddling again. Just let the pharmaceutical company put whatever they want on the market.  People will make the right choice.  Right, Ayn?

What would happen, pray tell, if we trashed all the “onerous regulations” that we have in place, removing second hand smoke, stop marketing cigarettes to children, mandating child seats, seat belts and air bags, vaccinations, dangerous toys.   Do people really want to do away with government regulation?  Do we want people to die from something preventable?

In 1979, failure of companies to have an adequate amount of chloride in new soy-based infant formulae led to 130 infants developing chloride deficiency.  The new product was faulty, despite company claims. How many have to die, be made ill, miserable, hospitalized at great cost, before we get things right?

In 1989, the number of new foods introduced annually was so large that there was concern people had no way to decide the safety, cost, and nutritional value of what they bought.  One may say, “the market” will decide, but “the market” requires people to decide based upon facts, not ads, and honest numbers, rather than slick commercials.  The change did not come from “voluntary action,” for it never does.  In 1990, after the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act, we started seeing all those numbers on food we buy at the store, and now even at places like Starbucks, where the other day, I had a cup of coffee in one of those red “Satan sippers.”

I wanted something nice with my coffee, but everything that looked good under the glass had 300+ calories, and even if I jogged home, I might burn a third of that.  I ended up buying Vanilla Bean Scones, 300 calories for 3 of them, figuring 100 calories a day extra for 3 days I could handle.  Everything under the glass looked great, for 400-600 calories.

What else did the Nutritional Labeling Act do for me?  Ten years ago, when I suddenly found my profile not to my liking, I stopped peanut butter, which I love, and olive oil, diminishing my intake 600 calories a day.  I read the labels. The change was slow, but over six months, I lost nearly 4 kg or 9 pounds.  On a trip to Oregon, preparing for the move, I ate at a coffee shop every morning, enjoying a Marionberry muffin, which must have been 500 calories extra.  A little of this, a little of that, and the weight came back.

For the past year, nothing changed, despite a lot of hiking and running, remaining 5 pounds heavier than I wanted.  Obviously, I was eating as many calories as I was burning.  That’s thermodynamics.  I then took a hard look at my grocery shopping.  It turned out to be an easy look:  I found two items of note: yogurt I bought was 60 calories more than a comparable amount, which tasted the same.  That isn’t much, but the fancy vegetarian hot dogs I had two days a week were another story.

I was stunned.  Each was 280 calories a pop, 1120 total when I had them for dinner twice a week. By going back to the traditional type, I saved 720 calories alone every week.  Added to the yogurt I was eating, I could eat essentially the same for 1140 fewer calories a week.  Within six weeks, I had lost 1.5 kg, more than 3 pounds.  I couldn’t have done it without the Nutritional Labeling Act.

For every “onerous” regulation, there were a large group of people who once said, “somebody ought to pass a law”.  That’s what politics should be, doing good for people.  I’m not out to trash capitalism, but I’m damned if companies should get away with….murder.  Their fiduciary responsibility is to their stockholders.  We the government have a fiduciary responsibility to we the people, not we the stockholders.

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