Soapbox

A San Francisco judge has thrown out a ballot initiative, “Care not Cash”, voted by a 60% margin last November, saying only county representatives (i.e. the San Francisco Board of Supervisors) have authority to define welfare standards.

While I have my own doubts about that welfare reform package, I find curious to say the least the idea that elected representatives have higher sovereignty than the people they derive their legitimacy from.

Update (2003-09-18):

The San Francisco board of supervisors has killed the measure. Contempt for voters is not the exclusive province of right-wingers, it seems.

Update (2004-04-30):

A state appeal court has reversed the decision, citing saying it was upholding the right of voters and exercising the court’s “duty to jealously guard the prerogative of initiative”. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine, but also exceedingly slowly

An excellent article in The Guardian summarizes the current attacks on politically inconvenient science in the US. It is instructive to compare this with Stalin’s USSR. The parallel is unfortunately too close for comfort.

Trofim Lysenko was an agronomist who devised a method to improve the yield of winter wheat, an important achievement in a country suffering from famine due in large part to criminally incompetent mismanagement by Communist central planners. He believed in a form of Lamarck’s theories, that basically species evolve by transmitting inherited characteristics, rather than by natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Lysenko led a series of attacks on genetics, beginning in the mid thirties and culminating with the purge of of the father of Soviet genetics, Nikolai Vavilov in 1940 (initially sentenced to death, he died in 1943 while in solitary confinement). Lysenko then assumed complete control over Soviet agronomical “science”, all modern genetics starting with Mendel’s laws were banned (some of Vavilov’s vital work on biodiversity survived, but is endangered today), and the most outlandish theories (like spontaneous generation of germs) promulgated.

The Communist regime found Lysenko’s theories congenial, as they offered the perspective of genetically improving homo sovieticus using the same brutal tactics applied to Russian arts, religion and history.

Vavilov was rehabilitated when Nikita Khrushchev came to power, but Lysenko managed to hold on, in part with flattery, in part with outright fraud to cover up his lack of results. He was finally sacked in 1965, when the damage he had done in thirty years became impossible to ignore.

From CNET News.com:

Flat-panel monitors to take market lead

Flat-panel monitors for desktop computers are expected to surpass traditional cathode ray tube monitors in revenue this year, a sea change for the display industry.

And a good thing too. CRT monitors contain large quantities of toxic materials such as lead, and their disposal comes at a terrible human cost. All my home desktop machines now have LCD monitors. If you are in the market for a monitor, please spend the extra $100 or so. Your eyes and the planet will thank you.

Charlotte Observer

Rep. Coble (R-NC) stated on radio he feels the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was justified and appropriate given the circumstances. He justifies his position with the bogus argument that this was done for their own protection.

Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) was interned as a chld with his family at a concentration camp like Manzanar. I had the privilege to hear him speak a few months ago, and he recalled his father saying: “Mike if it’s for your own protection, you have to wonder why you’re inside barbed wire with machine guns pointed at you.”

The problem is, Rep. Coble is not just another faceless bigot disgracing Congress. He is the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. Like Trent Lott before him, he should be made to resign as his positions show just how unfit he is for that office.

And now for a slightly different take on the Columbia disaster, and the recriminations that started soon after.

After the Challenger accident in 1986, a commission was convened to investigate. One of its members was the Physics Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman, who recounts the commission’s work, and the obstacles entrenched NASA administrators put in its path, in his second book of memoirs What Do You Care What Other People Think? (a sequel to Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, both make for a rollicking good read and are included in the anthology Classic Feynman).

I am sure many of Feynman’s trenchant observations will remain relevant as the various commissions reveal the tensions between (expensive) safety requirements for the shuttle (specially in terms of the shuttle project’s human infrastructure), and the cost overruns of that white elephant in the sky, the International Space Station…

Many NASA critics question the need for human involvement for tasks that could be done just as well by cheaper and expendable robots (no life support systems needed). But apparently NASA’s bureaucrats have decided only the drama of humans cavorting in space will hold the public’s attention long enough to fund the space program. To quote Jerry Pournelle (I don’t usually agree with his politics, but here I think he is right):

Saturn was the most powerful machine ever made by man; and NASA took two working Saturns and laid them out as lawn ornaments so that they would not compete with Space Station and Shuttle. This was deliberate destruction of the people’s property, but those who did it were promoted, not sent to prison where they ought to be. Perhaps that is too strong: but they ought to be dismissed with prejudice, barred from ever working on any government or government financed or government approved project whatever. It was done for pure politics to ensure the need for Shuttle. And it was criminal.