Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 132 Editor's Choice: 2
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Perfect timing
[Read the article: Supreme Court gun ruling could backfire]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The ideologues of the Supreme Court could not have created a new constitutional right at a better time: when the dollar is steadily losing value, the cost of oil is rising, and the economy is in free fall. The silver lining in all of this is the one increasing statistic: the crime rate. Free and easy access to guns portends a bull market in gun related crime.
I suggest that the world's elite money managers introduce a new financial instrument to offset some of their catastrophic portfolio losses, due to events they couldn't possibly have foreseen and worked assiduously to avoid, such as the real-estate credit crunch; and the slowdown in transportation, manufacturing, services, and construction due to the rising cost of energy. That new financial instrument is the option on violence.
With all the guns around, it makes neoliberal sense to make a market out of the violence that studies show is five times more likely to occur in states without gun control than in states that do have gun control. Ask my brothers (two police officers). The option on violence will act as insurance policy in case you need to discharge your weapon, or in case it discharges accidentally--whatever.
You purchase more of the options depending on the severity of the violence you intend to inflict, from a light peppering (to taste) of your hunting buddies, to all out global thermonuclear war. And if for some reason you believe that in some neighborhood the crime rate goes down, you can purchase put options on violence.
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Why do candidates move to the center in two-candidate plurality voting elections?
[Read the article: The baseless, and failed, "move to the center" cliche]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is a mathematical theorem that in a two-candidate, plurality voting election, both candidates will position themselves toward the center. This is called the Median Voter Theorem in social choice theory; there are numerous references on the web.
While the Median Voter Theorem holds under idealized conditions, some argument could be made that because elections are pitched at such a low level that the conditions are approximately realized. The conditions of the Median Voter Theorem are that the election is a single-issue election, such as "hope" versus "fear"; the candidates know the distribution of voter preferences on the issue; the distribution of voter preferences has a single peak (not bi- or multi-modal), and so on. Moving to the median voter is a nash-equilibrium for each of the candidates.
Part of the difficulty is with plurality voting--I suggest a move to approval voting.
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Global Warming is of strategic interest to the United States
[Read the article: Anti-science conservatives must be stopped]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Despite the conservative naysayers, the federal government is heavily invested in climate research. Take the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab (GFDL) in Princeton, NJ. This is a NOAA facility involved with sophisticated climate models. Raytheon, a major defense contractor, is involved in day-to-day operations.
Typically, climate models require the resources of high-performance computing facilities with thousands of processors. These facilities cost tens of millions of dollars to implement, and millions to maintain.
Why is climate research a matter of national security, involving the oversight of defense contractors and personnel with security clearance? For at least two reasons. First, it is of strategic interest to the United States to know how the planet will be affected by global warming. If large parts of China or the Netherlands are going to end up submerged under 20 feet of water, and millions of people will have to be evacuated, this U.S. would not want to leave the ability to forecast this to, let us say, non-allied countries. Another reason is that with the increased likelihood of hurricanes in the Gulf (to mention one case of extreme weather) it is a matter of national security to have better models for predicting the likely trajectory of a hurricane as it approaches land. A wrong guess can cost billions.
Despite the global warming deniers among politicians who are loyal to the big energy lobby, which represents only one industry among many that positively dwarf the media economically, you can rest assured that funding for the development of sophisticated climate models and the elaborate high-performance computing systems, scientists and operational support personnel needed to design, run and maintain them them is provisioned by the federal government as a matter national security.
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Defense contractor involvement in climate research is hardly liberal smugness
[Read the article: Anti-science conservatives must be stopped]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Consider the technical services web page of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the Princeton Forrester Campus in Princeton, New Jersey. Observer the the site is managed by Raytheon personnel. One of their duties is public relations, or as they put it, "to...create products for presentation and publication, and communicate GFDL's accomplishments to other agencies and to the public." There is a reason that a defense contractor is involved in the public relations effort, and not, say, indymedia.
I defy you to find a single smug liberal among the ex-military personnel involved in this operation.
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More sociological drivel
[Read the article: Anti-science conservatives must be stopped]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]All you have to do is look at the institutions doing the research on global warming, and the involvement of major defense contractors in this effort in case you might be swayed by arguments of "liberals" versus "conservatives." The active funding by the federal government, the need for security clearance for much of the work, and the involvement and oversight of defense contractors make framing the issue as one of conservatives versus liberals almost laughable.
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@publicola: it is a national security concern, and defense contractors are involved
[Read the article: Anti-science conservatives must be stopped]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is no question that the Federal Government has been actively undertaking global warming research. I gave one example of a NOAA facility, the GFDL. It is a matter of national security, or else defense contractors would not be involved in the day-to-day operations and the public relations effort. This is easy enough to check.