Again from The Atlantic, Chauncey Hollingsworth describes the evolution of his thinking about guns and how changes in social attitudes are increasing the risk of our endemic gun culture. I think this line of thinking is essential to the gun-violence debate, and not much considered in the media.
Today the unnamed editor sticks up for Secretary of State Ken Bennett in trying to kick the sales-tax initiative off the ballot. After clearly stating his opposition to the measure, he declares adherence to the fine points of procedure more important than the will of the voters.
If this stickling for the letter of the law were his real motivation, why does he feel compelled to go on about how he doesn't like the idea of a new sales-tax extension? To me this screams of an argument rigged to reach a preset conclusion.
Along the way, the editor mischaracterizes the proposed tax as "only an extension of a current tax." In point of fact the new proposal is better designed to focus the funds on education and keep them out of the hands of the Legislature, which has misappropriated them over the past three years.
He also holds back some important information in saying that Bennett "believes that the group's submitted paperwork does not match the verbiage on the circulated petitions." The backstory is that the group did indeed file two versions with the SoS's office, one in hard copy and a slightly longer one in electronic form that it wound up using for its petitions. Bennett's staff never looked at the version on CD to make sure the two versions were reconciled, and rather than do the sensible thing and paste the CD version into the website, they accepted the paper version as the only one and retyped the hard copy. This doesn't sound like smart management to me.
For the record, I won't support another sales-tax extension either. I think our retailers and less-well-off consumers have taken it in the shorts for the Legislature's incompetence long enough.
But liking or disliking the tax is beside the point. More than 290,000 voters signed petitions asking for the vote, and the mistake by Mr Bennett's office in putting the wrong version on his website cannot invalidate the intentions of the voters who signed on to the actual petition language.
If we truly care about the the headline's "integrity of the process," we have to go with the voters, not the legal dodge that best suits the outcome we want, and the court agrees. If we hope to live up to our ideals and encourage more people to participate in public life, our electoral and initiative processes have to be inclusive. We have to do our best to give ideas and people a chance to prove themselves whenever we can. Using niggly procedures and arbitrary obstacles to keep people out only confirms the idea that the game is rigged.
Writing in The Atlantic, Richard Florida presents some illuminating facts about gun violence in this country . Hint: the most common ideas in the culture are myths, and mythic thinking is a factor.
The head of Harvard's Economics Department, Greg Mankiw, crunches some numbers and finds, surprisingly, that middle-class Americans are now receiving slightly more from the government than they pay in. The blog post is non-technical and a good, brief primer on the tax/transfer balance.
Old Grumpy McNasty puts his foot in it again. I know, no one gets the irony.
The AZ Capitol Times (sub req) is reporting that the shift in voter registrations to the "other" columns continues, favoring Republicans against Democrats in some key races this fall. The article leaves independents out of the vote calculus, so its conclusion has a pretty high bogosity ratio, but the chart is interesting:
In a blog post yesterday, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman calls the lie that the US economy is headed for some sort of Greek-style meltdown, based in part on this chart, showing that US bond rates have reached their lowest point since the war:
In which the retiring Arizona senator characterizes our recovering economy as half-dead and proposes that we should turn it back over to the Republicans, who will finish it off with a bullet to the head.
He starts with the monthly employment report, that is the unexamined bottom-line number of 80,000 jobs gained (like, new jobs for everyone in the quad-city area in a month), characterizing it as "disappointing." This presumably opposed to the end of the Bush administration, where we started losing twice that many a month.
I get it, if we want to put the zoom back in the economy and make more money for the rich white guys that might trickle down to us peons, we want to see bigger employment numbers, sure.
But let's bust out some figures to get a little clearer idea of what's actually going on.
The number of people employed in the private sector has broken through its level at the beginning of the Obama administration and is steadily clocking upward:
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| Eating our brains since '87. |
In today's column the unnamed editor reviews his fact-check fail in the case of last month's puff piece on William Few, who apparently made some claims about his military record that were untrue. The editor seems unhappy about this, but generally deflects the paper's responsibility for reinforcing the story back on its subject, while refusing to call his lies anything worse than "unacceptable."
Fictionalized personal war stories are somewhat ickier than fish stories, I'll grant. But as the Supreme Court ruled last week, there's nothing illegal about it. That comes as a relief to anyone who's ever padded a resume.
The editor, on the other hand, sees specific harm in the practice. He says, "Misrepresenting one's military service is much more serious, though. In doing so, a person seeks to elevate his or her own perceived value while diminishing that rightfully belonging to someone who really did the work, faced the dangers and accomplished the missions," (emphasis mine).
I was a little startled to see how my friend Tom, whose style is normally quite carefully measured and his arguments stolid and calm, breaks out in today's column to a new level of alarm and apparent deep anger at the craven gamblers who hold our economy hostage to profit at any cost.
He's been reading Matt Taibbi, who's always inspiring in showing how to combine solid reporting with a strong point of view and emotional clarity. Taibbi takes no prisoners, and is often ahead of the pack in getting to the root of a complex problem.
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| The house always wins. |
Pop Rocket, July 2012
The annual monsoon is upon us, or it should be. Late immigrants to our area will be forgiven for scoffing at the idea that significant amounts of water fall from the sky this month, as the weather trend has been progressively drier in recent years. June and the anticipation of July always remind me of our dire situation with water and our glacially slow progress in doing anything about it.
Contrary to appearances, we're not completely paralyzed. I recently spoke with Prescott Valley Water Resources Manager John Munderloh about a pilot project he's working on with the Upper Verde Watershed Protection Coalition (which in documents goes by the mind-numbing acronym UVWPC) to study various engineering schemes to keep rainwater from evaporating and get it into our aquifers instead.
It's called macro rainwater harvesting, and the plan is to take five half-acre plots donated by Chino Valley, treat them in different ways that promote concentration and penetration of water, and study and compare the results to come up with engineering cost-benefit analyses.
This small pilot project has been in development for four years and will run for three, maybe five years before it offers conclusions. The five governments involved, including the Yavapai-Prescott Tribe, have put up $130,000 for it. If everything goes well, construction could begin late this summer.
Obviously no one's planning to bulldoze vast areas of the county and do landforming and soil amendments to catch rain. But on a scale of a few acres here and there in spots most conducive to recharging the aquifers, it could do some good. Says Munderloh, "The days of large single-source water projects may be waning. Those things have already been developed. There's probably not going to be another canal from the Colorado River for us. So we need to look at all the possible solutions. This may not be the panacea, but it may fill in a number of gaps."
See, it's all about small percentages. Currently only about 2% of rain makes it into groundwater supplies. About the same amount runs off to sprinkle golf courses in Maricopa County. The rest evaporates after it hits the ground or transpires from plants. Encouraging another 1% to sink in could make our area far more sustainable long-term.
It'll cost us, of course. Munderloh: "We have to let water supplies go by that would be cheap for us to appropriate, but because there's a senior appropriator downstream, we have to let the cheap water go, and we go after the more expensive stuff."
This really brings home to me how we have to put a much higher priority on securing water resources. Other than some pretty tight individual conservation on a large scale, which no one in officialdom thinks we're ready to even contemplate, no option is easy. (Did I just mention that conservation is easy?)
The UVWPC is moving ahead with this in a perfectly rational way, carefully looking at options, building consensus and doing long-term studies to get an idea of what sort of initiative will be most effective. On top of the physical challenges, we'll also have to satisfy a recently constituted committee in the state Legislature that nothing we're contemplating will have any effect on the big cities downstream.
Given the already huge groundwater deficits we run every year to quench the thirst of a population too large for the ecosystem to carry, compounded by a decades-long drought with no end in sight and accelerating climate change promising worse, all this careful incrementalism sets my hair on fire. We're moving slower than grass growing, and there's no grass.
Rick Shroads, president of Civiltec Engineering and the contractor handling the project, tells me there are other ideas on the table: "We have a menu of pilot projects that we'd like to do, but of course funding is our stumbling block." The coalition picked this project to fit its budget, essentially. The designs that it'll be testing for five years are already working elsewhere in the world, presumably racking up hard results daily. I try to imagine why we're not plugging those numbers into our spreadsheets and moving to the next phase, and all I can think is that Americans simply won't take anything seriously that's not invented here.
This is not a problem we can put off for decades, and there's no silver bullet. We're already using a lot more water than we have coming in, and every sensible scientific projection shows progressively less coming in for the foreseeable future. All around us, the ghost towns show us what happened when the mines tapped out. Imagine how much more decisively a lack of water will wither our economy.
We need a very serious concentration of human and monetary resources working this problem with old-school wartime priority if we're to hope to solve it. We're all going to have to kick in, and there's no getting around paying much more for water. (Think I mean "a lot more"? Double it.) That will come sooner or later, and the sooner it comes, the more time we have to build and balance a sustainable system. But bear in mind that anything we do with engineering will still depend on rain, and there will be less of that all the time. Use less. Now use less than that.
Front page top: "'Help from above' saved church camp." Oh, please.
The headline is in half quotes, yes, but the same idea is in the body of the piece without them. Obviously there was no miraculous event in the story. Humans started the fire, humans put it out.
Religionists talk like this all the time, sure, and there's nothing against putting such blather in news stories with attribution and quotes. The offensive sloppiness here comes from the editor's blind spot around religion. Some self-examination and professional review is in order. But to that I'll add an apology to the firefighters for cheapening their work in favor of the sky-pilot myth.
Update, Wednesday: It's fascinating how quickly and uniformly the Xtians rise up, recast criticism of the editor's mistake as an attack on the faith, and bemoan their persecution in the comments. The persecution mythos, inherited from Judaism, is one of the dangerous angles of this particular faith — if you believe someone's out to get you, it justifies all sorts of aggression.
