Undernews: January 11, 2012

Entire nation may have to migrate if sea levels keep rising

Popsci - If their islands are deluged by rising seawater, the people of the Maldives would have to evacuate, becoming the first refugees driven from their homes by global warming. Their president considers this an eventuality, not a possibility, and so he is buying up land in foreign countries and urging those countries to be prepared for an influx of people with no return destination.

President Mohamed Nasheed told the Sydney Morning Herald that his government was considering Australia as a potential new home for the Maldives’ 350,000 citizens. He said Maldivians want to stay on their archipelago, but “moving was an eventuality his government had to plan for,” the newspaper said. “He said he did not want his people living in tents for years, or decades, as refugees,” the Herald writes.

If sea levels rise as predicted over the next century by 23 inches, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the 1,200 islands of the Maldives archipelago will largely be submerged. About 80 percent of the land mass is less than three feet above sea level, and already 14 islands have been abandoned because of erosion, the Herald says. “It is increasingly becoming difficult to sustain the islands, in the natural manner that these islands have been,” Nasheed told the newspaper.

Iphone stops New York Philharmnic performance

Super Conductor - Tuesday night's New York Philharmonic performance of the Mahler Ninth was stopped dead by an unusual instrument--the iPhone.
An iPhone (using the marimba ring-tone) went off repeatedly in the fourth movement of Mahler's final completed symphony.

According to an eyewitness, the offending phone owner was in the front rows of Avery Fisher Hall when his phone went off. (A post by Michael Jo on the classical music blog thousandfoldecho.com specifies that the interruption happened just 13 bars before the last page of the score.) In other words, in the final moments of a 25-minute movement, that ends a 90-minute symphony.

"Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra," the concert-goer, music student Kyra Sims, reports. She related how the orchestra's music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good "three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long."

Mr. Gilbert asked the man, sitting in front of the concert-master: "Are you finished?" The man didn't respond.

"Fine, we'll wait," Mr. Gilbert said.

The Avery Fisher Hall audience, ripped in an untimely fashion from Mahler's complicated sound-world, reacted with "seething rage," Ms. Sims said. Someone shouted "Thousand dollar fine."

This was followed by cries of 'Get out!' and 'Kick him out!.' Some people started clapping rhythmically but the hall was quieted down. House security did not intervene or remove the offender.

The ringing stopped. "Did you turn it off?" Mr. Gilbert asked.

The man nodded.

"It won't go off again?"

The man shook his head.

Before resuming, Mr. Gilbert addressed the audience. He said: "I apologize. Usually, when there's a disturbance like this, it is best to ignore it, because addressing it is sometimes worse than the disturbance itself. But this was so egregious that I could not allow it."

"We'll start again." The audience cheered....

Mr. Gilbert turned to the orchestra and said "Number 118." (Again, thanks to thousandfoldecho.com for this detail.) The band picked up the movement from the final fortissimo ending in the brass, and played the work through to its last, quiet pages.

Shop Talk: Scanning an Ipad

Sam Smith - My new Ipad* is the best new tech toy I've had in years. I use it mainly for reading, rather than writing, but that's a good part of my day since I typically scan over two thousand headlines.

I have recently conducted an experiment discover the fastest way to do this. What I've found is that for scanning a list of headlines (such as in an RSS feed) or Facebook, the trick is to read the first page and then, with a finger starting at the lowest item, flip it in a natural curve at a speed that allows you to read each item. Don't flip it vertically, but use the natural arc of your hand as it moves up. I've found this system faster than constant scrolling or flipping each page with a fast motion.

*If we are to recover our status as a free nation, we not only need to retrieve campaign financing from corporations, but spelling. Don't let any corporation tell you how to spell something.

Romney thinks distribution of wealth should only be discussed in "quiet rooms"

From NBC:

QUESTIONER: When you said that we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy, I’m curious about the word envy. Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?

ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent versus one percent, and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent, you have opened up a wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God. The American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it.

QUESTIONER: Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy, though?

ROMNEY: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.

Homeland Security monitoring sites from Drudge to NY Times

Reuters - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.

A "privacy compliance review" issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a "Social Networking/Media Capability" which involves regular monitoring of "publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards."

The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to "collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture."

A DHS official familiar with the monitoring program said that it was intended purely to enable command center officials to keep in touch with various Internet-era media so that they were aware of major, developing events to which the Department or its agencies might have to respond.

The monitoring scheme also features a five-page list, attached to the privacy review document, of websites the Department's command center expected to be monitoring.

These include social networking sites Facebook and My Space - though there is a parenthetical notice that My Space only affords a "limited search" capability - and more than a dozen sites that monitor, aggregate and enable searches of Twitter messages and exchanges.

Among blogs and aggregators on the list are ABC News' investigative blog "The Blotter;" blogs that cover bird flu; several blogs related to news and activity along U.S. borders (DHS runs border and immigration agencies); blogs that cover drug trafficking and cybercrime; and websites that follow wildfires in Los Angeles and hurricanes.

News and gossip sites on the monitoring list include popular destinations such as the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and "NY Times Lede Blog", as well as more focused techie fare such as the Wired blogs "Threat Level" and "Danger Room." Numerous blogs related to terrorism and security are also on the list.

No Child Left Behind: The death star of American education

Diane Ravitch, Ed Week - After 10 years of NCLB, we should have seen dramatic progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, but we have not. By now, we should be able to point to sharp reductions of the achievement gaps between children of different racial and ethnic groups and children from different income groups, but we cannot. As I said in a recent speech, many children continue to be left behind, and we know who those children are: They are the same children who were left behind 10 years ago.

In my travels over the past two years, I have seen the wreckage caused by NCLB. It has become the Death Star of American education. It is a law that inflicts damage on students, teachers, schools, and communities.

When I spoke at Stanford University, a teacher stood up in the question period and said: "I teach the lettuce-pickers' children in Salinas. They are closing our school because our scores are too low." She couldn't finish her question because she started crying.

When I spoke at UCLA, a group of about 20 young teachers approached me afterwards and told me that their school, Fremont High School, was slated for closure. They asked me to tell Ray Cortines, who was then chancellor of the Los Angeles Unified School District, not to close their school because they were working together as a community to improve it. I took their message to Ray, who is a good friend, but the school was closed anyway. The dispersed teachers of Fremont are still communicating with one another, still mourning the loss of their school.

When I spoke to Citizens for Public Schools in Boston, a young man who works as a chef at a local hotel got up to ask what he could do to stop "them" from closing his children's school. It was the neighborhood school, he said. It was the school he wanted his children to attend. And they were closing it.

In city after city, across the nation, I have heard similar stories from teachers and parents. Why are they closing our school? What can we do about it? How can we stop them? I wish I had better answers. I know that as long as NCLB stays on the books, there is no stopping the destruction of local community institutions. And now with the active support of the Obama administration, the NCLB wrecking ball has become a means of promoting privatization and community fragmentation.

I have often wondered whether there is any other national legislature that has passed a law that had the effect of stigmatizing the nation's public education system. Last year, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that 82 percent of our nation's schools would fail to make "adequate yearly progress." A few weeks ago, the Center for Education Policy reported that the secretary's estimate was overstated, and that it was "only" half the nation's schools that would be considered failing as of this year. Secretary Duncan's judgment may have been off the mark this year, but NCLB guarantees that the number of failing schools will grow every year. If the law remains intact, we can reasonably expect that nearly every public school in the United States will be labeled as a failing school by 2014.

If you take a closer look at the CEP study, you can see how absurd the law is. In Massachusetts, the nation's highest-performing state by far on NAEP, 81 percent of the schools failed to make AYP. But in lower-performing Louisiana, only 22 percent of the schools did not make AYP. Yet, when you compare the same two states on NAEP, 51 percent of 4th graders in Massachusetts are rated proficient, compared with 23 percent in Louisiana. In 8th grade, again, twice as many students in Massachusetts are proficient compared with Louisiana, yet Massachusetts has nearly four times as many allegedly "failing" schools! This is crazy.

More evidence of the invalidity of NCLB. The top-rated high school in the state of Illinois, New Trier High School, failed to make AYP. Its special education students did not make enough progress. When outstanding schools fail, you have to conclude that something is wrong with the measure.

Recovered history: Shakespeare's pursuing bear

Improbable Research - Tom Levenson pursues the parlous question of Shakespeare’s exiting bear. Levenson writes about the book Verdi’s Shakespeare, by Garry Wills:
There, in the first chapter, Wills made mention of Winter’s Tale, and its alpha and omega of stage directions: “Exit, pursued by bear.” …

Wills tells me laconically, first, in the body of his text, writing that “when it [Shakespeare's troupe] had a young polar bear on hand, he wrote a scene stopper…”

That was curious enough. A polar bear? In London. In 1610?

Dive into the footnotes, and it gets better:

“It used to be thought that the ‘bear’ was a man in costume. But scholars have now focused on the fact that two polar bear cubs were brought back from the waters off Greenland in 1609, that they were turned over to Philip Henslowe’s bear collection (hard by the Globe theater), and that polar bears show up in three productions of the 1610-1611 theatrical season….Polar bears become fierce at pubescence and were relegated to bear baiting, but the cubs were apparently still trainable in their young state."

More on Shakespeare and bears

Bloomberg wants to slash legal liquor sales

NY Post - The [NYC] Health Department’s far-reaching Partnership for a Healthier New York City initiatives proposes to slash the number of establishments in the city that sell booze.

Community “transformation” grants provided under President Obama’s health-care law would help bankroll the effort.

One of the goals listed in the “request for proposal” document to community groups is “reducing alcohol retail outlet (e.g. bar, corner store) density and illegal alcohol,” the document states.

“Talk about a nanny state. Why don’t they just close all the liquor establishments?” quipped Mike Long, a former liquor-store owner in Bay Ridge and head of the state Conservative Party.

“This is absolutely insane. They want to run the retail establishments in New York,” said Long, who likened the effort to the temperance movement of more than a century ago.

Health officials and advocates have also discussed banning liquor advertising seen by millions of straphangers in the transit system.

“Reduce the exposure to alcohol products and bar advertising and promotion in retail and general (trains, buses, etc.) settings (stores, restaurants, etc”, the department’s document says.

Scott Wexler, president of the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association, vowed to go to court to fight any unilateral action by City Hall.

“More social engineering by Mike Bloomberg. What a surprise!,” Wexler said.

American founders the GOP would never support because they weren't good Christians

Only about 83% of federal taxes are paid voluntarily and on time

Economist - More than $2 trillion in taxes is collected annually by America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The tax gap, the amount of tax liability that is not paid on time by corporations and individuals in America, was $450 billion in 2006 according to a new report by the IRS. The last "tax gap" report, which looked at the 2001 tax year, estimated some $345 billion was unpaid. In terms of compliance, little has changed since the last report; still only around 83% of tax revenue is paid voluntarily and on time. As in 2001, under-reporting makes up the majority of the tax gap, primarily as individuals understate their incomes, take improper deductions or overstate their business expenses. After late payments and enforcements are taken into account, an estimated $65 billion of the $450 billion total will eventually be recovered.

Nude pictures in Supreme Court revealed

Emily Weil, Washington Post - Yesterday’s debate in the high court over the government’s role in regulating naughty words and images on the public airwaves revealed a shocking fact sure to rile conservatives of delicate sensibilities...

A lawyer representing ABC noted that some people even complained to the FCC about an offensive statue shown in the Olympics opening ceremony. He said it was similar to statues that exist in the courtroom itself, ones with “bare breasts and buttocks.”

He directed the justices’ gaze to the friezes decorating the room. “Right over here, Justice Scalia,” he said.

Things you didn't know about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

From Iwatch News citing a three-part profile by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism,

Here are six facts about Walker from the series for Wisconsin voters -- and the rest of us -- to consider:

1. Walker is the first governor in Wisconsin history to face a recall attempt. If he loses a potential recall election, he would be only the third governor in U.S. history to be thrown out of the statehouse mid-term.
2. PolitiFact Wisconsin has deemed 27 statements the governor has made about the state finances, the public sector protestors, and school staffing numbers "Mostly False," "False" or, worse, "Pants on Fire." The fact-checking group has reviewed 39 statements from Walker.
3. In a taped phone call with a blogger posing to be conservative mega-donor David Koch in February, Scott Walker admitted that he had "thought about" planting troublemakers among the labor protestors in an effort to discredit the movement.
4. As Milwaukee County executive in 2009, Walker sent layoff notices to public sector employees in an effort "to get their attention," as he put it in an interview with a Madison radio host.
5. As a sophomore at Wisconsin's Marquette University, which Walker attended but did not graduate from, he ran for student body president. The future governor lost the election after he was sanctioned for illegal campaigning and called "unfit" by the student paper for his "blatant mudslinging."
6. Walker's first experience in fundraising was for an Iowa flag. As an 8-year-old living in Plainfield, Iowa, he collected money in a mayonnaise jar to help buy a state flag to fly in front of the building where city meetings were held, according to his mother, Patricia Walker, a retired bookkeeper. His father was a Baptist minister.

Obama's chief of staff is big Israel supporter

Ynet News, Israel - "Jacob Lew is an Orthodox Jew who treats his religion very seriously. It is important for him that his children are raised as Jews," Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky said of the new White House chief of staff.

Sharansky said that while Lew is a "pure democrat," he has a "warm place in his heart that is reserved for Israel and Judaism."

Sharansky opined that Lew would not remain indifferent to Israel. "For him, it's not just another country. His faith and bond with Israel and the Jewish people is an important part of his life," he said.

"With tensions running high – he's the ideal man to calm the spirits in the White House," Sharansky argued. While he refrained from predicting an improvement in Israel-US relations following the appointment of Lew, Sharansky said he is convinced that Lew's presence will have a positive effect in the media sphere.

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How to hide your bad restaurant rating

QUICK MEME

Sustain yourself

Make your own magnetic wristband to hold screws and nails while you're working

Stats

Average young adults downs nine drinks when they binge

Furthermore. . .

Flowchart for choosing your religon

Everything you need to know about the Strait of Hormuz before the war with Iran starts there

32% of NH Republicans have shaken hands with at least one GOP presidential candidate

Reddit to go silent on January 18 in protest of SOPA

Recovered history: The rise of the White House staff

Andrew Rudalevige, Monkey Cage - The January 1937 report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, made up of public administration mandarins Louis Brownlow, Luther Gulick, and Charlies Merriam (all closely supervised by FDR), served as the basis of the Reorganization Act of 1939 and Executive Order 8248 that same year, creating the Executive Office of the President. The EOP was to house the new White House Office and, importantly, the Bureau of the Budget (today’s Office of Management and Budget, then part of the Treasury), but its population grew quickly. In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower appointed the first White House chief of staff with that title (former NH governor Sherman Adams).

The point of the White House staff, as the Brownlow report saw it, was simple: “The President needs help.”

That help was to be provided by a new cadre of “not more than six administrative assistants,” as well as by the institutional resources of the budget bureau. Six was not a random number ¬added to a handful of secretaries and others, it was as many as the president could personally supervise. In that sense, a chief of staff was antithetical to the Brownlow conception. Nor was the the distinction between the personal staff in the White House proper and the institutional, mostly career, staff in the rest of the EOP a throwaway line. The role of the institutional staff was to protect the presidency as an office and entity, rather than focusing on the political standing of whomever was president at the time.

Even the idea of six new staff for the president outraged many in Congress. Yet as presidents’ managerial responsibilities grew, FDR’s successors found themselves with an NSC, a congressional relations staff, a CEA, a communications staff, a Domestic Council, etc., etc. Jimmy Carter was the last president to attempt to manage the White House without a designated chief of staff. These days one can count not six but perhaps 1500 people who do substantive work “directly” for the president.. . .

It is worth adding the report’s famous description of the duties of White House staffers. They were only to conduct information to the president from across the government, and to conduct presidential decisions back to the administration. “These aides would have no power to make decisions or issue instructions in their own right. They would not be interposed between the President and the heads of his departments. They would not be assistant presidents in any sense,” the committee members wrote. Indeed, “Their effectiveness in assisting the President will, we think, be directly proportional to their ability to discharge their functions with restraint.”

In one of the most famous phrases of the report, this meant that each aide “should be possessed of high competence, great physical vigor, and a passion for anonymity.”

Obama names third high rolling Wall Streeter as his top aide

Weekly Standard - President Obama's first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once sat on the board of troubled federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Bill Daley, the president's chief of staff whose departure was announced today, was previously a top executive at financial firm J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. So of course there should be little surprise that Obama's latest chief of staff, announced today by the president himself, also has deep ties to the financial industry himself.

From 2006-2008, Jack Lew was chief operating officer of Citibank's alternative investments division. And it was his division that made billions of dollars betting "U.S. homeowners would not be able to make their mortgage payments," as the Huffington Post reported.

The piece also reported: “Lew made millions at Citi, including a bonus of nearly $950,000 in 2009 just a few months after the bank received billions of dollars in a taxpayer rescue, according to disclosure forms filed with the federal government. The bank is still partly owned by taxpayers.”

How the super rich have seceded from the United States

FEMA demands money back from Katrina victims

Black America Web - More than six years after Hurricane Katrina ripped through lives and The Gulf region in ways that have yet to be fully healed or even comprehended, the notoriously dysfunctional Federal Emergency Management Agency is now adding insult to injury for many by seeking to recoup nearly $400 million in relief funding paid out to hard hit and distressed victims of the storm, maintaining that clerical or employee errors may have resulted in some victims marginally receiving more compensation than what may now be allocated. Just last week - and with a new hurricane season perilously looming - the agency began mailing out more than 83,000 debt notices to Katrina and other 2005 storm victims demanding that they reimburse the government an average of $4,622 each.

Personal to Rick Santorum: is Pennslvania as perverted as Boston?

Back in 2002, Rick Santorum wrote an op ed for Catholic Online in which he explained sex scandals in the Massachusetts Catholic Church this way: "When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

Which, given the recent scandals at Penn State, is it now fair to say that his homeland is as perverted as Boston?

More daily papers aren't publishing daily

Women's second class status in Israel

Great moments in journalism
From Jim Romenseko's blog:

January 2008: The [Hartford] Courant runs an investigation headlined, “Hartford Magazine’s Michael Guinan: A Legacy of Debt”

October 2010: The Courant reports Guinan is fired as Hartford Magazine co-publisher following an investigation into financial irregularities at the publication’s parent company.

January 2011: The Courant reports Guinan is accused of diverting funds.

October 2011: Michael Guinan is named Hartford Courant director of advertising.

December 2011: Hartford Courant buys Hartford Magazine.

Christian segregationists: Pope says gay marriage threatens humanity

Daily Mail, UK - Gay marriage is one of several threats to the traditional family unit that undermines 'the future of humanity itself', Pope Benedict XVI warned yesterday.

The pontiff told diplomats from nearly 180 countries that the education of proper of children needed proper 'settings' and that 'pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman.'

The Pope made his comments, some of his strongest yet against gay marriage, during a new year address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican.

During his speech, he touched on some economic and social issues facing the world today, including gay marriage.

He said: 'This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society."

Read more

Over two million latinos fail to check ethnic box on census form

Dennis Romero, LA Weekly [A] study by USC's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, published in the journal Social Science Research, found that about 6 percent of people with Hispanic or Latin American ancestry failed to check the "Spanish/Hispanic/Latino" box on the Census.

That's 2.5 million people, almost enough to fill up the county of San Diego -- and scare the hell out of the anti-immigrant suburb of Escondido.

But who are these people who don't think they're Latino? What are they? Aguileran?

According to the school:

Non-Hispanic identification was most common among U.S.-born Latin Americans, respondents with mixed ancestries, those who speak only English and those who identify themselves on the race question as black or Asian, the study found.

There are also those folks who claim a clean and unfettered lineage that leads directly back to Spain (think Steve Lopez)...

If the Census did away with its ridiculous menu of ethnic options and stuck with Latino, as defined above, we'd clear up some of this.

USC seems to agree:

Respondents' confusion with the terms ethnicity, ancestry and race often result in inconsistent answers on the U.S. Census surveys, the study found. Oftentimes the lines among these categories are blurred. And as immigrants assimilate, their identities shift

Report: Gambling magnate discusses pumping $20 million into Gingrich campaign

Politico - Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has discussed directing $20 million to an outside group backing Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, multiple sources told Politico – a good sign for allies who have been pushing the former speaker’s longtime billionaire supporters to sign on.

But Adelson called Politico to challenge the characterization that he had committed $20 million.

“I’ve made no commitment to anybody. Now, doesn’t mean I won’t in the future, but up ‘til now, no commitment has been made and no amount has been stated,” he said, refusing to answer questions about whether he’d met with representatives of the super PACs supporting Gingrich.

“I’m not telling you who I talked to,” he said, explaining that he “would prefer to stay under the radar,” despite his high-profile in the business world. “But when it comes to political issues, or my personal issues or my philanthropic issues, I only allow anything to be done, I never talk about what I’m going to do to anybody. All I just do is do.”

Stats

Serious crime at lowest level since 1963

Word

Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. - A.A. Milne

Did you ever stop to think. . .and then forget to start again? - A.A. Milne

Entropy update

America is over as we know it: Twinkies & Wonder Bread are seeking bankruptcy protection

Furthermore. . .

Embedded TV anchor Wolf Blitzer thinks candidates ought to have our praise for working so hard. . .

#HarpersIndex: Fee charged since 1951 by South Carolina for anyone interested in registering as a 'subversive agent' : $5

This Maine state trooper ought to train NYC cops

Letter from John Steinbeck to his son about love

Flowchart for choosing your religion

30 story hotel built in 15 days

Best airline attendant announcement of late

Emanuel trying to suppress protests with higher fines
How the flighty have fallen

Two previous polls in Florida had Gingrich leading Romney by 15 points. The latest Quinnipac has Romney ahead by 12

Romney caught in a lie

A new DNC video blasts Mitt Romney for claims he made in Sunday's debate "when he said he hadn't seen the ads from a pro-Romney Super PAC. Less than a minute later Romney listed the attacks made in the ad as if he had written them himself."

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