Authoritarian Followers

Dr. Bob Altemeyer, a retired professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba, devoted forty years to studying authoritarianism, and literally wrote the book on it in 2006 (highly recommended, and conveniently free). Much shorter, and directly addressing recent years, his 2016 post Donald Trump and Authoritarian Followers deserves a fresh look¹. (Those who’ve read it can skip this post; Bob’s the expert, I’m just saying his work is important, go and see and judge for yourselves.) The portion of that 2016 post I most want to point-out is the enumeration, in Trump’s context, of authoritarian followers’ pschological traits. Those traits strike this writer as essential pieces missing from the mental puzzles many people are struggling to assemble as they try to understand Trump’s coup attempt of January 6th, his insurrectionists, the enablers of both within the Republican party and right-wing echo chambers, where those people came from, and where they’ll go.

Bob Altemeyer:

We know a lot about authoritarian followers, but unfortunately most of what we know indicates it will be almost impossible to change their minds, especially in a few months. Here are some things established by experiments. See if you recognize any of these behaviors in Trump supporters. Compared with most people:

They are highly ethnocentric, highly inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. Because they are so committed to their in-group, they are very zealous in its cause. They will trust their leaders no matter what they say, and distrust whomever the leader says to distrust.

They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experience stronger fear than people skilled at “keeping their heads while others are losing theirs.”

They are highly self-righteous. They believe they are the “good people” and this unlocks a lot of hostile impulses against those they consider bad.

They are aggressive. Given the chance to attack someone with the approval of an authority, they will lower the boom.

They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities, non-heterosexuals, and women in general.

They will support their authorities, and even help them, persecute almost any identifiable group in the country.

Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They have highly compartmentalized minds, in which opposite beliefs live independent lives in separate boxes. As a result, their thinking is full of double-standards.

They reason poorly. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they don’t pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent. They especially have trouble realizing a conclusion is invalid.

They are highly dogmatic. Because they have mainly gotten their beliefs from the authorities in their lives, rather than think things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.

They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know and listen to tells them they are. That happens because they screen out sources that will suggest that they are wrong.

Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them. And thinking they are “the moral majority” supports their attacks on the “evil minorities” they see in the country.

They believe strongly in group cohesiveness, and being loyal. They are highly energized when surrounded by a crowd of fellow-believers because it makes them feel powerful and supports their belief that “all the good people” agree with them.

They are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain.

They are largely blind to themselves. They have little self-understanding and insight into why they think and do what they do. They are heavily into denial.

I hasten to add that studies find examples of all these things in lots of others, not just authoritarian followers. But not as consistently, and not nearly as much.

Thank you, Bob.

Returning to two issues from the opening paragraph — where Trump's base came from, and where they’ll go post-Trump: Trump’s base isn’t his at all; authoritarian followers have always been a part of our society. Trump merely borrowed the current batch, and put them to work. Even if Trump were to magically vanish tomorrow, they’re not going anywhere, and won’t be changing their minds about much of anything. They’ll be waiting for the next leader who tells them they’re right and good, their desires will be fulfilled, and those they hate will be punished. No matter how many partisan divides are healed, people with their psychological traits will continue to appear in the population, find each other, form self-reinforcing groups, seek leaders to follow, and, tragically, break their children as badly as they themselves were broken.

That’s all bad, but it’s also nothing new.

The good news? A healthy society is likely to reduce the toxicity of authoritarian followers from one generation to the next¹, while a dysfunctional society will increase it. So, this writer’s master plan for America remains unchanged (and short on details): A United States government devoted to maximizing the quality of life of every American, at no harm to the rest of the world. Also, short-term, let’s finally take terrorism by white people seriously, and find some more checks and balances to protect the nation from authoritarians in its government, so we all arrive at the long-term in one piece.

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1. See also Bob Altemeyer’s 2018 post Why Do Trump’s Supporters Stand by Him, No Matter What?. It ends on a hopeful note, but should be read in context.

The Silent (Unthinking, Well-Educated) Majority

“Both the allegiance and socialization processes cause the educated to believe that what America does is right. Public opinion polls show the nonthinking results. In late spring 1966, just before the United States began bombing Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam, Americans split 50-50 as to whether we should bomb these targets. After the bombing began, 85 percent favored the bombing while only 15 percent opposed. The sudden shift was the result, not the cause, of the government’s decision to bomb. The same allegiance and socialization processes operated again when policy changed in the opposite direction. In 1968, war sentiment was waning; but 51 percent of Americans opposed a bombing halt, partly because the United States was still bombing North Vietnam. A month later, after President Johnson announced a bombing halt, 71 percent favored the halt. Thus, 23 percent of our citizens changed their minds within a month, mirroring the shift in government policy. This swaying of thought by policy affects attitudes on issues ranging from our space program to environmental policy and shows the so-called “silent majority” to be an unthinking majority as well. Educated people are overrepresented among these straws in the wind.” [Emphasis added. —CWJ]

Excerpt from: James W. Loewen. “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” 2nd. edition. Perseus, 2010-09-16. iBooks.

The Cost of Imperial America

From War Is A Lie by David Swanson, pp. 284-285:

We are [...] proud, however, of shoveling huge piles of cash through the government and into the military industrial complex. And that is the most glaring difference between us and Europe. But this reflects more of a difference between our governments than between our peoples. Americans, in polls and surveys, would prefer to move much of our money from the military to human needs. The problem is primarily that our views are not represented in our government, as this anecdote from Europe’s Promise suggests:

“A few years ago, an American acquaintance of mine who lives in Sweden told me that he and his Swedish wife were in New York City and, quite by chance, ended up sharing a limousine to the theatre district with then-U.S. Senator Jon Breaux from Louisana and his wife. Breaux, a conservative, anti-tax Democrat, asked my acquaintances about Sweden and swaggeringly commented about ‘all those taxes the Swedes pay,’ to which this American replied, ‘The problem with Americans and their taxes is that we get nothing for them.’ He then went on to tell Breaux about the comprehensive level of services and benefits that Swedes receive in return for their taxes. ‘If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot,’ he told the senator. The rest of the ride to the theater district was unsurprisingly quiet.”

Now, if you consider debt meaningless and are not troubled by borrowing trillions of dollars, then cutting the military and enlarging education and other useful programs are two separate topics. You could be persuaded on one but not the other. However, the argument used in Washington, D.C., against greater spending on human needs usually focuses on the supposed lack of money and the need for a balanced budget. Given this political dynamic, whether or not you think a balanced budget is helpful in itself, wars and domestic issues are inseparable. The money is coming from the same pot, and we have to choose whether to spend it here or there.

Though I have some problems with Swanson’s book, he raises more than a few important issues, including the one above.

So, what is the price of Imperial America? Military expenditures, as of 2007, were $503.4 billion, the highest in the world by a margin so large that they equalled the combined expenditures of the next thirteen biggest military spenders, which were, respectively, China, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil, South Korea, India, Turkey, and Australia. And, if those are nations we’re meant to be competing with, it’s worth recognizing that at least nine of those are either allies or nations we get along with just fine. And, in my judgement, China, the world’s no. 2 military spender at $114.7 billion per year, is more of an economic threat to the United States than a military one at present, given both the rapid growth of their economy in size and sophistication, and our increasing financial debt to them.

(During the Cold War, I used to think that a phrase like “American Imperialism” was merely rote propaganda. However, to this day no nation on earth has military bases in more countries than America—how many even still have military bases in other nations?—and that’s a sound working definition of “imperial,” so now I take the phrase, and the issue, quite seriously. And, if the bizarreness of this situation isn’t immediately apparent, perhaps due to being inured to it because it was the status quo before most of us were born, imagine for a moment how it would strike you if there were German, Japanese, Cuban, French—take your pick—military bases within the United States. Taking that hypothetical one step further, if you then heard that much of the populace of country X wanted to close their U.S. bases and reserve their national wealth for enriching the lives of their citizens, would you regard them as traitors, cowards, fools, or as people with sensible priorities?)

So, if we were to abandon the course of empire, a course that history demonstrates is fantastically expensive (in purely monetary terms, as well as human ones), and also assured to fail ultimately, our budget problems are readily solved, and our government can concentrate on using budget dollars to enrich the lives of our citizens with first-rate services (many of which would have the great benefit to our economy of taking large and variable financial burdens, like health care and retirement, off of the shoulders of employers, at least those that still attempt to supply such benefits), rather than on attempting to stage-manage planet earth at gun point. In the meantime, we can have as big a budget problem as the empire we desire. (…and as many enemies as its maintenance, through military presence, military action, and secret skullduggery, provokes.)

Further, as the Reagan administration chose to demonstrate with its policy (earlier advocated by the Heritage Foundation, if memory serves) of driving-up military expenditures in an attempt to create a budget crisis that would force Democrats to cut the social programs reviled by the administration and its backers, the budget crisis which pits military expenditures against social expenditures is a manufactured one, given birth and nourished over the decades by a specific desire to gut the nation’s public education system, social programs, its protective regulatory infrastructure, and the like.

We do not have to play along in this carefully orchestrated game. Discard its premise—that America must be an empire—and the constraints imposed by the game on our thinking about the scope and proper applications of our nation’s wealth, its international and domestic policy, even how we relate to the rest of the world and whether that can conform with our stated ideals of liberty and inalienable personal rights – all those constraints fall away, and we find ourselves freed to consider futures for America and we, its people, that have been withheld from us for generations. Renounce the confining darkness from our past, and we can have a long, bright future – and at very affordable rates.

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This is not an especially nuanced presentation, which I regret, but the facts of government services and military expenditures substantially speak for themselves, so, in all the places where nuance is missing here, its modifications to this message would, I believe, be minor and would not substantively affect the overall conclusion.

Human Face Recognition, a Presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta

The Austin Forum, on the evening of January 4, 2011, hosted an interesting presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta entitled “Digital Human Face Recognition,” which I attended because I find digital face recognition a fascinating technical challenge, an increasingly important social issue, and because I have an interest in a lesser, related problem: automatic face isolation (without regard to identity).

Regrettably, it does not appear to be the practice of the Forum to record video of these presentations, so you'll have to settle for her slides (PDF, 25.4 MB), and various points that seemed important at the time and therefore stuck in my head. Her results were significant, interesting, and some of them were even germane to my face isolation interests.

• Ironically, for me at least, Dr. Gupta’s presentation did not cover one of the first problems any real-world face recognition system has to solve, and the one in which I was most immediately interested: face isolation.
• Much of Gupta’s extremely successful “3D AnthroFace” work was performed against the “Texas 3D Face Recognition Database,” which pre-isolated the faces, consistently positioned them within every image, and used significantly higher resolution images than those I have experimented with. Also, since the photos in the recognition database are stereo and/or 3D, they provide significantly more data than 2D images. Their single deficiency, relative to photos I've worked with, is their apparent lack of color. The choice of monochromatic imagery was presumably rooted in a desire to ensure that their algorithm would work in the absence of color information, thus making it compatible with output from monochromatic cameras, like most security cameras.
• The “Eigenfaces” algorithm, published by Turk and Pentland in 1991, made face recognition truly practical for the first time by allowing a face to be characterized by as few as five numbers, quantifying key differences between the metrics of the observed face, and a prototypical “Eigenface.” Gupta sites it as having achieved a 21% verification rate with a false acceptance rate (FAR) error of 1 in 1,000, although it is not clear what size of database was involved in the test that produced that figure. Presumably, 20 years ago, the database would have been quite limited. Nonetheless, Eigenfaces has apparently been the basis for all subsequent face recognition work, and has been dramatically advanced over the years. It has also become the basis for many other types of automated visual recognition systems; as Gupta put it, there are now Eigenbolts and Eigenscrews, etc. For a great many classes of objects that require visual recognition Eigen images can be produced which allow the Eigenfaces algorithm (and its improved descendants) to be applied essentially unchanged.
• In the most recent standard industry test of face recognition (“Multi Biometric Evaluation” in 2009/10), which used a database of 3.6 million people and required the fully automated analysis of 8.7 million photos and videos shot in a variety of conditions, ranging from studio shots only marginally more complex than those in the “Texas 3D Face Recognition Database” (though not 3D), to real world video of moving subjects in widely varying photographic conditions, “3D AnthroFace” was not only better than any other technology, but had a recognition rate equal to, or better than, that of humans. However, the means by which the humans were tested was not specified, so it’s hard to know what to make of that claim. (It seems unlikely that any human was asked to review photos of 3.6 million people, and then search for them in 8.7 million photos and videos.)
• With regard to human face recognition capabilities, Gupta pointed-out that in a study of prison inmates exonerated by DNA tests, 84% had been incorrectly visually identified by human witnesses. So, at least under the conditions in which crimes are committed, investigated and prosecuted, human face recognition can be so poor as to be actively misleading. This isn’t news to many of us, but given its real-world importance, it probably can’t be repeated too often.
• Face recognition systems depend, as you’d expect, on a database of the faces they’re meant to recognize. The error rates (composed of the false rejection rate, FRR, and the false acceptance rate, FAR) of all extant, and predicted, face recognition systems increase with the number of faces in the database. This problem is regarded as intrinsic to the task, but it is widely believed that the growth in error rates can be reduced by using separate databases for storing the characteristics of faces that can be differentiated by readily identifiable gross characteristics. Race and, I believe, sex were mentioned as candidates for such characteristics. In such a system, the first step in face recognition would be to make that gross identification, and then to select the appropriate database based on it. After that, the existing face recognition approaches would be used within the selected database with significantly reduced error rates. Of course, the error rates continue to scale with database size, so the use of multiple databases only delays the point at which error rates become unacceptable, as face databases (presumably) will only grow in size for most any purpose for the foreseeable future.
• Despite the huge strides made in digital human face recognition, it is still bedeviled by a number of quite ordinary issues including unconstrained observing environments, human aging, the poses of subjects, variations in illumination, varied facial expressions, and the poor quality of images available from video systems. The latter issue was of particular interest to me, because many of the photos I have dealt with are comparable to images that might be obtained from video in their poor resolution and quality, suggesting that even the best face recognition systems would have had difficulty with some of the same images that have been a challenge to me.
• Dr. Gupta repeatedly refused to comment on the social implications of face recognition technology, stating that she was concerned only with the technology; what people did with it was not up to her. One wonders what the uniformed police officers, and anyone else in the audience who might have been considering operating a real-world face recognition system, took away from the presentation. While the results of Gupta’s work were truly impressive, as demonstrated in the Multi Biometric Evaluation of 2009/10, the real-world capabilities of all face recognition systems were called into question by her closing acknowledgement that a host of common issues posed major problems (see item above). Her discussion of the problem of error rates increasing as face databases grow only raised more questions. The industry’s anticipated method of mitigating the latter issue, as previously discussed, is to make an initial gross categorization of faces based on a characteristic like race, and then to search within category-specific databases. While this is a sensible technical strategy (if such gross categorization can be performed quickly and reliably), will its eventual developers and users realize that their technology is engaging in automatic racial profiling? Will they also realize that it is doing so because the more one relies on facial recognition technology, the less reliable it becomes? Either issue is significant independently, but, when considered together, they mean that being a member of one of the races that compose the largest of the category-specific databases brings a higher chance of being falsely identified (bad if the database is looking for criminals), and falsely rejected (bad if the database is supposed to grant someone access to their bank account, or confirm to border officials that they are who their passport says they are).

That’s everything I can think of to report. I hope some of it was of interest, and that I’ve done justice to Dr. Gupta’s impressive work.

How Should the Troops Die?

Alan Grayson, Democratic congressman from Florida’s 8th district, who urged his colleagues to vote against war funding in order to shut down those wars and bring the troops home, was accused by one of his opponents, Kurt Kelly, of putting “our soldiers, and our men and women in the military in harm’s way, and maybe he wants them to die.” Naturally, the accusation was made on Fox News. Here’s the key passage of Grayson’s response, from an August 17, 2010 email, which echos my own longtime thinking on this matter:

Yes, Kurt, I do want them to die: of old age, at home in bed, surrounded by their loved ones, after enjoying many Thanksgiving turkeys between now and then. And you want them to die: in a scorching desert, 8000 miles from home, alone, screaming for help, with a leg blown off and their guts hanging out of their stomachs, bleeding to death.

And how can anyone but a U.S. President be accused of placing U.S. military personnel in “harm’s way”? Ever since Presidents began illegally bypassing Congress to start wars, or otherwise involve troops in combat, they’ve been ultimately responsible for any occasion on which the troops were in “harm’s way.”

Grayson was defeated for re-election in 2010, doubtless clearing the way for a politician whose idea of “supporting the troops” is keeping them on battlefields in routine danger of death, mutilation, and mental and physical injuries that will last them a (possibly quite short) lifetime. “Support” like that is something our troops would live longer, better lives without.

RWA Scale Test Fixed

My thanks to R.C.H. who has pointed-out to me two bugs in my implementation of Bob Altemeyer’s RWA Scale. As always, I find bugs in my code embarrassing, and I’m grateful to R.C.H. for not only finding the bugs, but reporting them. Consequently, the code has now been fixed. So, for those who’ve answered “strongly disagree” (-3) to questions 7 or 8 in the past, if you retake the test, your answers will now be correctly scored. Until now, they’d been accidentally scored as “very strongly disagree” (-4).

Chalk up another victory for open source, and thanks again to R.C.H.

Government Secrecy, Andrew Jackson Style

Here’s a dose of perspective on government secrecy for this July 4th. I don’t mean to suggest that today our government can be as open as it was in Andrew Jackson’s (or Lincoln’s) time, but the following provides some perspective on how much the openness of our American government has decreased over the course of the past 150 years. To be sure, we’ve added some improvements, like the Freedom of Information Act, but, as we saw during the Bush administration, the various organs of our government have, or can take, far too much leeway in their interpretations of their obligations under that act. And, more generally speaking, because an informed electorate is critical to the success of a democracy, the less an electorate knows about the activities of its government, the less durable their democracy becomes.

From Secrecy by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, pp. 82-83:

Openness in deliberation and not least in diplomacy came to be seen as something of a democratic virtue, even an aspect of [American] national character. In 1860, one of Andrew Jackson’s early biographers reported an anecdote that cast the general as the very embodiment of this virtue. When Jackson was told that one Augustus, a servant with the run of the White House, might be smuggling presidential papers to the general’s opponents, Jackson responded:

“They are welcome, sir, to anything they can get out of my papers. They will find there, among other things, false grammar and bad spelling; but they are welcome to it all, grammar and spelling included. Let them make the most of it. Our government, sir, is founded upon the intelligence of the people; it has no other basis; upon their capacity to arrive at right conclusions in regard to measures and in regard to men; and I am not afraid of their failing to do so from any use that can be made of any thing that can be got out of my papers.”

Apocryphal or not, the anecdote bespeaks what appears to have been a widely shared sentiment. Then with the onset of the Civil War we observe the surely unprecedented notion of openness as an instrument of foreign policy. On December 3,1861, at the beginning of the second session of the Thirty-Seventh Congress, Abraham Lincoln accompanied his State of the Union message with 410 pages, all promptly printed, of dispatches to American ministers abroad. The dispatches dealt with the Confederate states’ efforts to obtain recognition from foreign powers, notably Spain, France, and Great Britain. It was a fateful enterprise in which assertive openness was considered the most effective policy, and there is reason to judge that this proved to be the case. Openness communicated our threats as well as our entreaties, and it did so, in the case of Britain, not only to Whitehall but also to an increasingly literate and volatile public. The United States was dealing with insurrection at home; did Her Majesty’s Government, did the British people consider that this same misfortune might befall England, or Ireland?

The Reagan Administration Meets the AIDS Pandemic…

…and allies itself with the virus, rather than politically unpalatable science. From Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, by J.B. McCormick, M.D., S.F. Fisher-Hoch, M.D., with Leslie Ann Horvitz, pp. 174-177; McCormick is writing:

Two very important discoveries began to emerge from our investigation. For one thing, we were recording far more cases of AIDS in women than we were used to seeing in the United States or Europe, where the disease was still striking gay men in disproportionate numbers. For another, we were also beginning to see a direct correlation between the number of sexual partners and the rate of infection. This was a finding similar to what physicians had observed among the gay men in San Francisco early in the AIDS epidemic. While we recognized that this was a disease spread by sexual transmission, the shock for us was that, in Zaire, it was almost entirely due to “normal” heterosexual intercourse. But that didn’t mean that there was no homosexual transmission. It was just that our investigation revealed that it was relatively rare among men living in Kinshasa. The same situation appears to be true of most of Africa. Certainly, there was no organized or visible gay community in Zaire, as there is in the West. On the other hand, compared to the West, heterosexual contacts in Africa are frequent, and relatively free of social constraints—at least for the men.

Our findings in Kinshasa were supported by similar investigations throughout Africa, notably in Rwanda. The world now had to face an uncomfortable, frightening reality. We thought about the ramifications of our discovery and discussed them at length. There was every reason to believe that, having found heterosexually transmitted AIDS in Kinshasa, we were likely to find it everywhere else in the world. Until this moment, especially in the United States, AIDS was linked almost exclusively to gays and drug addicts and other marginalized groups such as Haitians. It wasn’t something that was supposed to affect “mainstream” people.

In 1984, our team and a Belgian team in Rwanda, led by Van der Peer, published our conclusions in The Lancet, the venerable British medical journal. These articles would change the way that people looked at the disease. After reviewing the situation in Africa, we then posed a question: “Will this be the face of AIDS in the West within the next decade?”

To some at the time, the very question was itself blasphemous. But we know today, for many countries in the West, the answer is yes. In 1996, AIDS is now the primary cause of death in women between the ages of 25 and 40.

In my report to the director of the CDC, I suggested that AIDS was endemic in Zaire, and that it may have been present since the mid 1970s. I based my conclusions on accounts by physicians who had seen a number of undiagnosed cases of weight loss and diarrhea, invariably resulting in death over at least ten years. Although they’d attributed the cause to TB, it seemed in retrospect that the cause of death was probably AIDS related. In what was the most controversial part of the report, I went on to characterize the disease as one that was spread by heterosexual contact in Zaire, adding that there was no evidence that homosexuality or drug abuse had played a significant role in its transmission. I recommended that the CDC undertake a long-term collaboration with the Ministry of Health of Zaire to establish a system of surveillance for the disease in that country. Finally, I called for the WHO to convene a workshop on the problem to be held either in Kinshasa or Brazzaville, in the neighboring Congo. These recommendations were subsequently accepted.

I returned to Atlanta on November 8 and immediately reported to my chief, Gary Noble, and to the director of the Center for Infectious Diseases, Walter Dowdle. After listening to what I had to say, they both agreed that I should meet with Bill Foege, director of the CDC. This was the year that Dr. Foege had announced his departure as head of the agency, and because his successor, James Mason, happened to be visiting CDC that day, he was invited to sit in on the meeting. In addition, we were joined by Jim Curran, director of the HIV/AIDS Division, and Fred Murphy, director of the Division of Viral Diseases. Serendipity had brought together in one place and time many of the major players in AIDS who were associated with the CDC.

Bill Foege had lived and worked in Africa, so right away he recognized just how grave a situation we were confronting. He decided that we should put in a call to Dr. Edward Brandt, U.S. assistant secretary for health. I was put on the speaker phone with him. I did not know who he was—other than that he was a Ronald Reagan appointee—and I had no idea how he might respond. I began by describing our data and went on to outline our major conclusions. I tried to spell out everything as simply and as clearly as possible.

There followed a long silence on the other end.

Brandt began by saying that I must have got it all wrong.

“There must be another explanation for your findings. Have you considered other vectors, like mosquitoes?”

Mosquitoes were obviously easier for him to talk about than sex.

“I don’t think that the evidence supports that, sir,” I said. “So far, we’ve found very little disease in children. And children get just as many mosquito bites as adults—probably more. That’s why they suffer so much from malaria. And if AIDS were transmitted by mosquitoes, we wouldn’t have seen the sort of random [sic] pattern of distribution of the disease in the population that we did. When you look at malaria, you can see see a random pattern. We all know anyone can get malaria; it just depends on who gets bitten. But what we saw with this disease were definite chains of infection as well as clustering around sexual contacts. There were hardly any cases with children or with old people.”

My explanation, as well-reasoned as I thought it was, failed to sway Brandt. He seemed bent on coming up with another theory; just so long as it would let heterosexual intercourse off the hook. Our discussion went on like this for about twenty minutes. But nothing I could say seemed to make an impression on him. I was stunned by the depth of disbelief—or, rather, denial—on the Washington end of the line. Certainly, everyone sitting in the room with me understood the compelling nature of the evidence and realized that it was imperative that we take action.

Evidently, the conclusion the administration had reached was very different. This was the Reagan era. If AIDS was going to have an explanation, it seemed then it would have to be politically and socially more acceptable than what we had to offer. Voters were not going to like our message. They rested easier easier with the notion of a “gay plague,” as the disease was called when it first became known to the general public. There was a self-satisfied, ugly moralism about that notion. What we proposed to tell them is that AIDS was a plague all right, but that no one was immune.

By steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the dimensions of the AIDS crisis, the Reagan administration made itself an ally of the virus. It would take another year before Washington’s policy would begin to change, with the appointment of C. Everett Koop as surgeon general. Koop, a political conservative with a strong sense of right and wrong, was a great physician and objective scientist. He refused to contaminate public health with ideology.

As George W. Bush might have said at the time, “Brandtie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Further, consider: After the meeting described above the Reagan administration knew that HIV/AIDS could kill not just the members of groups it hated or despised, but the people it considered “normal” … and it did nothing, rather than deal with a fact that would not play well with its base – a group that it now knew was no more immune to HIV/AIDS than any other people. So, not even protecting the lives of its political base was more important to the administration than securing its votes.

The Authoritarians

Ever since I finished reading it a few weeks ago, I've been meaning to recommend the book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. So, consider it recommended. It’s available online for free at the page linked-to above. The book’s been out since 2006, so it’ll already be familiar to a lot of people, but it was news to me when I learned of it a few months back, and I know I’m not the only one. So, like I said: recommended.

There are more things of interest in that book than I can shake a stick at, so I’ll just touch on one: Altemeyer reproduces a quote from President Carter (see page 181) in which he was “describing the fundamentalist movements that have taken control of the Republican Party”, as Altemeyer characterized it. The quote is this:

“Almost invariably, fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and, within religious groups, have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers.”

According to the footnotes, that’s from Carter’s book Our endangered values: America’s moral crisis, pg. 34.

Altemeyer’s research suggests that those authoritarians are even worse than Carter described. But what interested me most about that quote is its relationship to something I heard President Carter say in an interview more than a decade ago, on PBS’ News Hour, in which he said something to the effect that the politicians and other movers and shakers he encountered in Washington during his presidency were unusually apt to state, at least privately, that they had attained their privilege, power and wealth due to being God’s chosen ones. The rest of us, by extension, were some lower order of being that was meant to be ruled by, and serve the interests of, them, the chosen ones. (I don’t remember him indicating that that viewpoint was specific to members of any one political party, by the way.) Carter, of course, was appalled by such assertions.

The existence of that attitude struck me as being of the utmost importance, both to explain a lot of things that happen in the halls of power, and as a warning of what more could happen, and so I set off to read almost everything President Carter had written, both before, and after, his presidency, hoping to find him expanding on that statement. Unfortunatley, while I found many interesting things in his books, I never found that statement, or anything like it.

Nonetheless, that statement, at least as I remember it, fits in very well with Altemeyer’s research, especially on what he calls the “Double Highs.” (See chapter 5.) And Altemeyer was good enough to specifically study the attitudes of the members of America’s state legislatures. (Regrettably, his survey was performed before the test for “double highs” existed, but the results are relevant, nonetheless.) He describes the results as follows:

I sent the thirty-item RWA scale I was using in my research then to fifty legislative chambers, and in every single one except the Louisiana House, the Republicans scored higher overall than the Democrats. Although the “right-wing” in right-wing authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority (see chapter 1), not a political ideology, the RWA scale finds different levels of this trait in politicians from the two parties. The Republicans scored almost 40 points higher than the Democrats on the average, on the 30-item scale.

The graph he provides showing where the Democrats and Republicans of the various state legislatures scored on the RWA scale (see figure 5.1 on page 201) shows Republicans scoring in a very tight grouping at the high end of the scale, and Democrats scattered all over the scale, though mostly scoring lower than Republicans. That probably explains the high cohesion within the Republican party, and what I perceive to be the low cohesion within the Democratic party. Offhand, I can’t find an indication of exactly when Altemeyer conducted those surveys, but he indicates that they were all done before 1994. So, if President Carter wasn’t noticing any more of the “I’m God’s chosen one” attitude in one party or the other during his administration (and that’s a big “if”, because he simply might not have mentioned it, or I may not have remembered him mentioning it, or it might have been edited out of the interview), Altemeyer’s data would indicate that holders of that attitude disproportionately and rapidly migrated to the Republican party.

That such a profoundly undemocratic attitude exists anywhere within our society is inevitably destructive. When it finds a place where it is welcome and can congregate it becomes lethal. And so to the “chosen ones” I say this: You are not superior to the rest of us, and your conceit that you are has soaked your hands in blood that will not wash off.

Beware Your Socialist Roads

In a time when intellectual standards have dropped so low that any involvement of government in the lives of its citizens can be labelled “socialism,” it seem only appropriate to warn the U.S. populace against using its socialist roadways.

Here’s how the Carfree Times (always worth a read) March, 2010, issue lays out the facts, as supplied by that well known band of socialist agitators that is the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDoT). This will be old news to anyone who follows transportation issues, but assertions I’ve encountered over the years, like “my vehicle registration fee pays for my share of the roads” suggests that these facts need to be repeated over and over again until a lot more people have heard them. (Perhaps painting them on the roads would do the trick....)

Road Taxes vs. Road Expenditures

The Texas Department of Transportation republished an earlier study that confirms the general wisdom: roads are very expensive. This comes from a pro-pavement DoT that now admits that the capital costs for design, construction, and maintenance of roads far exceeds the total tax receipts allocated for highways.

The study estimated that gasoline taxes would have to be raised six-fold to bring revenue in line with expenditures. The cost of gasoline (currently $2.50/gallon) would have to rise to $4.35.

"Green" cars are seen as a problem in themselves. Their lower demand for fuel will actually exacerbate the highway budget crisis.

The study revealed that no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees.

For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

None of this is news, but it's interesting to see the truth seeping out in a state such as Texas.

"TxDot’s newsletter”
Keep Texas Moving
20 November 2009
"TxDOT: No road pays for itself
Gas tax is not enough"
Houston Tomorrow
2 December 2009
"Do roads pay for themselves?”
Progressive Railroading blog
6 December 2009

As the TxDoT newsletter article goes on to explain, “This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads we have analyzed pay for considerably less.”

Anyone who thinks this is somehow a mistake, or a problem caused by the use of some gas taxes for purposes other than maintaining roads, or just some weird quirk of how things are done in Texas (socialist hotbed that it is), need only consider the Interstate Highway System. It’s best known to many people as their “freeways.” The Interstates were built at a cost to the states of ten cents on the dollar. In other words, the federal government subsidized their construction to the tune of 90% of their cost.

The RF Scale

I’ve automated another one of the surveys from Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians. (My first effort, the “RWA Scale” is discussed in a previous entry on this blog.) This time, it's the “RF Scale.” What it’s measuring will be pretty obvious, pretty quickly. Just in case there’s any doubt, I’ve included Altemeyer’s description of the purpose of the survey at the end of the page.

Because this survey works in the same way as the previous one, I’ll quote myself to save time:

Note that your score is computed entirely on your own computer – none of the data is transmitted or recorded anywhere, so nobody will ever see it but you. On the one hand, this seems like a bit of a shortcoming, because it’d be interesting to know how other people score, but, on the other hand, surveys whose participants are self-selecting are meaningless. Add to that the fact that an anonymous Internet survey has no reliable way of excluding trolls, or preventing people from submitting their preferred answers repeatedly to try to shift the results in whatever direction they like, and Internet surveys go past “meaningless” to end-up somewhere around “outright misleading.” So, let’s not even play that damn fool game.

If you’re curious, I score a 12 on this survey.

Once again, it’s food for thought. Happy thinking.

This survey, like the last one I created, is fully standards-compliant and therefore works correctly in modern web browsers like Safari, Firefox and Chrome. It might work with the latest versions of Internet Explorer (if not version 8, then 9), but as to other versions, previous experience says: probably not. The old joke about the phone company applies to Microsoft’s stance on standards compliance: “We don’t care. We don’t have to.” Microsoft’s stance has improved very recently, but having ignored web standards for around ten years, they have a lot of catching-up to do.

The RWA Scale – Investigating “public opinion concerning a variety of social issues”

A friend (thanks D.C.) brought an interesting book to my attention the other day, the cornerstone of which is a survey known as the “RWA Scale” developed by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. The survey describes itself as “an investigation of general public opinion concerning a variety of social issues,” and saying anything more would probably be a mistake. Anyway, because the book and survey looked interesting, computing one’s survey score struck me as a bit tedious, and it gave me an opportunity to use Javascript (ugh) in a way that I hadn't used it before, I decided to automate the survey. Some quick googling turned-up one pre-existing online version of the survey, but only available to Facebook users, among whom I am not counted. However, given that the book from which the survey was taken was published in 2006, and the survey was in use for quite some time before then, there must be other online versions (perhaps you've already encountered lots of them), but I wanted to try my hand at automating it, and so I have.

I’d go into more detail about the book and the survey here, but it’s probably best to take the survey knowing as little as possible about it. So, if you’re still curious, take the survey.

Note that your score is computed entirely on your own computer – none of the data is transmitted or recorded anywhere, so nobody will ever see it but you. On the one hand, this seems like a bit of a shortcoming, because it’d be interesting to know how other people score, but, on the other hand, surveys whose participants are self-selecting are meaningless. Add to that the fact that an anonymous Internet survey has no reliable way of excluding trolls, or preventing people from submitting their preferred answers repeatedly to try to shift the results in whatever direction they like, and Internet surveys go past “meaningless” to end-up somewhere around “outright misleading.” So, let’s not even play that damn fool game.

I’ll just tell you that my score ranges from 27 to 33 depending on how I interpret some of the questions, while the author’s introductory psychology students average around 75, and their parents around 90. A 2005 survey of 1,000 Americans reportedly also showed an average score of 90. That’s all discussed after the survey, where you will also find a link to the entire book (available free online) from which the survey and associated text were taken. Admittedly, including that information on the same page as the survey might introduce some bias into the results, but I thought that anyone who’d just gone to the trouble to take the survey deserved some explanation and context.

It’s all just food for thought. Happy thinking.

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

Our bodies are of course what get left out of a theory that treats architecture as a language, a system of signs. Such a theory can’t explain the physical experience of two places as different as Grand Central Station and my little shack, because the quality of those experiences involves a tangle of mental and physical, cultural and biological elements that the theory can’t account for, blinded as it is by old Western habits of regarding body and mind as separate realms. Taking the side of the mind in the ancient dualism of mind and body, this theory can only explain that part of architecture that can be translated into words and pictures, published in magazines and debated at conferences. An architecture that ignores the body is certainly possible; the proof is all around us. But I doubt it will ever win our hearts.

—A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan, pg. 214.

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And Now, The Links

• Conquering cancer with implants? Bioengineered vaccines and magnetic nanodiscs show promise
• Air Force space plane shooting for April launch
• Ares team pressing forward with plans for Ares I-X Prime flight, for now
• SpaceX founder weighs in on Falcon 9 launch readiness – Can’t wait to see Falcon 9 and Dragon work. Good luck, folks.
• Blue Origin Update on Opportunities for Research – Quiet, but still active. Looking forward to what these folks do in the long run.
• New space telescope to hunt for stealth asteroids
• Martian meteorite surrenders new secrets of possible life – The return of ALH84001. Welcome back.
• Fresh claim for fossil life in Mars rock
• Martian "Lake Michigan" Filled Crater, Minerals Hint
• Rainbow trapped for the first time
• Superconductors can come in from the cold
• LHC smashes protons together for first time
• Carfree Times no. 56 – Always worth a look.
• The Future of Trains: In-Depth Reports
• US bets $150m on high-risk renewable energy – Pretty small bet, considering the stakes.
• First osmosis power plant goes on stream in Norway
• Nuclear fuel: are we heading for a uranium crunch?
• World's last bastion of stable ice now thawing
• One for the Ages: Bristlecone Pines Break 4,650-Year Growth Record
• Extinction Countdown: New species galore in discoveries around the world
• Military Divorces Edge Up Again In 9th Year Of War – I knew a Navy officer who was “Dear John”-ed during W.’s initial attack on Iraq. Unfortunately, he has lots of company.
• Obama Pushes Hundreds Of Lobbyists Off Federal Advisory Boards
• Krugman: Tax The Speculators
• Feelin' the Heat – Blue Cross/Blue Shield asks for trouble, gets it.
• 'Godfather of Spam' sentenced to four years in prison

Weekend Links

• Maryland Voters Test New Cryptographic Voting System – Hmm... Interesting....
• Texas snatches voter system from $863m IBM contract
• Xoie Claims $1 Million Lunar Lander Prize
• 'Space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize
• NASA juggles manifest for future Ares test flights
• Video: Aerial View of Ares I-X Flight Test
• Aerial video provides view of Ares 1-X parachute trouble
• Hubble’s New Camera Delivers Another Stunner
• Orbiter camera sees ice-covered Phoenix lander
• Mars rover plans its escape – Spirit not a weather station, yet.
• Ground teams struggle to save Mars orbiter from itself
• Strange Brew at LCROSS's Crash Site
• LRO Image of Apollo 17 Landing Site
• Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning
• Ionic batteries could multiply battery life by 11
• How to Keep Planes From Colliding With Lasers
• Nov. 3, 1993: Theremin Fades Out
• Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic
• Does Vitamin D Improve Brain Function?
• Oldest American artefact unearthed
• Darwin’s Wolf Mystery Solved
• Was life founded on cyanide from space crashes?
• Frozen Antarctic lakes yield new viruses
• Giant crack in Africa formed in just days
• Civil War In Corporate America: Banks Battling The Chamber On Accounting Rules
• Copyright Treaty Is Policy Laundering at Its Finest
• The ACTA Internet provisions: DMCA goes worldwide

Weekend Links

• An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• H1N1: Yes, You Should Vaccinate Your Kids
• Is the swine flu vaccine safe?
• Six diseases you never knew you could catch
• Antidepressants and depression may both harm a fetus
• Stop giving antipsychotics to people with dementia
• Light All Night Not Alright
• Woman's Rape Called “Pre-Existing Condition” by Insurance Companies
• Human Spaceflight Ball in Obama’s Court
• NASA iPhone Application
• Apollo-Era Crawler Carries Test Rocket to Launch Pad – Well, of course, but the crawlers deserve whatever publicity they can get.
• Risk and ingenuity cross paths on Ares 1-X test flight
• Static electricity rule threatens on-time liftoff
• Augustine panel submits final report on spaceflight options
• Bolden Directs MSFC Special Team to evaluate HLV alternatives
• Fudged titanium could threaten next Mars rover – "Everybody thought we were buying a (military) standard titanium that was properly treated for use. It turns out it wasn't worked properly."
• Astronomers find organic molecules around gas planet
• Found: first 'skylight' on the moon – The caverns of the moon.
• $500,000 treasure dug up in lunar soil – NASA's "Regolith Excavation Challenge" has a winner.
• Laser microscope aims to uncover alien life
• Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
• Modeling a black hole with a 300 GigaWatt laser
• Huge CCD Could Give Real-Time View of Dark Energy Hunt
• LHC reaches operational temps, collisions start in 5 weeks
• World’s Biggest Digital Brains Think in Teraflops, Model the Universe
• Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
• Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
• Fatal frog fungal disease figured out
• How City Noise Is Reshaping Birdsong
• The year's best wildlife photos – Wonderful wolf photo.
• Shoot new angles with kite photography
• How much are coral ecosystems worth? Try $172 billion--A year
• Counting the hidden ($120 billion) cost of US energy economy
• Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics?
• Stealthy wind turbines aim to disappear from radar screens
• Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped?
• House Considers Limiting Patriot Act Spy Powers – Thank you, John.
• Judge Refuses to Lift 5-Year-Old Patriot Act Gag Order
• Editing Scientists: Science and Policy at the White House
• Sequoia e-voting code reveals possible FEC rule violations – And if no problems had been detected in the Sequoia code, how would anyone know that the clean code (and no other code) was actually executing in the voting machines, and their support infrastructure? If election integrity matters – if democracy matters – electronic voting machines must go.
• Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released – No matter how well-intentioned and executed, open-sourcing software—and I say this an author of open-source projects—does not have the magic power to turn bad ideas into good ones. Electronic voting is, and will remain, a bad idea.
• California Investigating Problems With Voting-Machine Audit Logs
• Apple shuts down ZFS open source project – If the author is correct that Apple is abandoning ZFS, that's a bad move on Apple's part. Forget ZFS' ability to pool disk drives, or take snapshots, or its many other great features – the fact that it did error detection and correction to prevent files from being corrupted was something everyone would have benefited from, just as those of us with Mac Pros benefit from error correcting memory. These errors do happen, but most systems can't even detect them, let alone correct them, so they don't receive the attention they deserve. Dear Apple: Do better than this, you're long overdue.
• Time Warner Cable Exposes 65,000 Customer Routers to Remote Hacks
• Super-Sized Memory Could Fit Into Tiny Chips – A 1 terabyte RAM chip, potentially.
• Super Concrete in the U.S. Military, Iran … and the Pyramids?
• Can Google Earth save an indigenous tribe with maps?

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

The prevailing theory as to why, as a species, we left off hunting and gathering is that we had ruined that perfectly good lifestyle by overdoing it, killing off the megafauna on which we depended. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why humans would ever have traded such a healthy and comparatively pleasant way of life for the backbreaking, monotonous work of agriculture. Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren't). Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturalists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 279.

---

And Now, The Links

• Orionids Meteor Shower Starts This Weekend
• Fireball Picture: Meteor Explodes Over the Netherlands – A once-in-a-lifetime photo.
• Elusive lunar plume caught on camera after all
• "Rejected" Protons Offer a New View of the Moon
• Opportunity rover finds yet another Mars meteorite
• Robot nuclear windjammer to sail patio-gas oceans of Titan
• What shook up Saturn's rings in 1984?
• IBEX maps edge of Solar System
• Mystery Emissions Spotted at Edge of Solar System
• Astronomers clash with US air force over laser rules
• Ares I-X TVC retesting taking place – Range Safety Waiver overview
• Testing, reviews continue for grounded climate satellite – It may never fly, but so far it has shown an amazing ability to not-quite-die.
• Building a second sun: Take $10 billion, add coconuts – An article on ITER.
• 'Magnetricity' observed for first time
• First black hole for light created on Earth
• Crystal is one-way street for microwaves
• Entanglement on demand – This Scientific American article has ceased to exist, and now forwards would-be readers to an article in Nature, which is not publicly available. Sigh. However, the article is still available from the Google cache, but probably only temporarily.
• Research in a Vacuum: DARPA Tries to Tap Elusive Casimir Effect for Breakthrough Technology
• Solving the crystal maze: The secrets of structure
• Swine flu vaccine shunned despite availability
• Sick American dogs get first shot at cancer drugs
• Labs-on-a-chip that you can shrink to fit
• Placebo effect caught in the act in spinal nerves
• Evolution details revealed through 21-year E. coli experiment
• Plants Recognize Siblings: ID System In Roots
• Conservation targets too low to save at-risk species
• Out of your head: Leaving the body behind
• It's official: Your bullying boss really is an idiot
• Psychopaths are distracted, not cold-blooded
• Secret ACTA treaty can't be shown to public, just 42 lawyers
• White House: Fox News Is 'A Wing Of The Republican Party' – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• Jay Lake: Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?
• Oct. 16, 2002: Second Great Library Opens in Alexandria – If memory serves, the original Library of Alexandria burned not once, but three times. Leaving that historical quibble aside, the idea of replacing it is appealing. Looking at the new building, however, I can't help but wonder: What is the new library's design life? Will the building they've built last 500 years, or even 100? And even if it does, will it still be maintainable? If the answer to any of those questions is "no," did the architects really consider the significance of what they were designing, or was it viewed as just another high-profile win for their firm? Anyway, here's wishing the new library better luck than its predecessor.
• How to Get More Bicyclists on the Road

Weekend Links

• Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine – Not quite Dr. Strangelove, but it's close. Thanks to Brendan.
• Ammo rationing at Wal-Mart as panic buying sweeps US – Meanwhile the reality based community waits and worries about the next Oklahoma City, the lynching of federal workers, etc.
• Waterboarding Doesn’t Work, Scientists Say – Not news, but it bears repeating.
• Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation – Thanks to Dave.
• The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life Gets Weird
• Stream of Evidence from 3 Spacecraft Indicates That the Moon Has Water
• Meteorite impacts turn up nearly pure water ice in Mars's mid-latitudes
• Craters Show 1970s Viking Lander Missed Martian Ice by Inches
• Juno probe on target for 2011 departure to Jupiter
• Found: 62 meteor showers new to science
• Sept. 25, 2002: Mysterious Meteorite Dazzles Siberia
• Asteroid attack: putting Earth's defences to the test
• How to Truck 66 200,000-Pound Antennas to 16,000 Feet
• Antennae Key to Butterfly Navigation
• Wylie Coywolf: The coyote-wolf hybrid has made its way to the Northeast
• Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve — Leopold/Lone Star Land Steward Award – More good, and richly deserved, publicity for David and the Preserve.
• Roger Ebert adds to health care debate on iPhone, Mac use
• Inflammation Brings on the Blues
• The Long Now Blog: A Mental Health Break
• Innovation: Classic computers on the danger list
• Gallery - March of the outdated machines
• Carfree Times, Issue 55 – Always worth a look.

Weekend Links Unclogged

• The real Turing test: learning to say sorry.
• Brown apologises for 'appalling' treatment of Turing
• Read This If You Hate Meetings
• Better world: Take Friday off… forever – I seem to recall that the American worker's productivity has doubled since the 1940s; maybe we could reduce the work week to 20 hours....
• Single Vaccine Dose, Even One from 1976, Could Protect against the H1N1 Swine Flu
• Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D – No excuse for not getting vaccinated, but very interesting.
• Vitamin D Deficiency May Increase Risk Of Colds, Flu – Again, no excuse for avoiding vaccination, but very interesting.
• NO Good: Nitric Oxide May Be Key to Overcoming Antibiotic Resistance
• 13 more things that don't make sense.
• Igniting Fusion
• Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings – If only it’d been a dead parrot.
• Icy stares and dirty minds: Hitch-hiking emotions.
• Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads.
• Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
• First Drug Shown to Extend Life Span in Mammals
• Can Aging Be Solved?
• July 16, 1867: Concrete Gets Some Positive Reinforcement
• Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America’s Night Skies
• Rethinking the bee's waggle dance.
• Moth Blocks Bat Attack by Jamming Sonar
• Rare plant worthy of Endangered Species Act protection--But won't get it.
• Spy Satellite Sea Ice Images Finally Made Public
• Potential Neuropoison Could Be in Our Food
• Obama, Farm Industry Clash Over Antibiotics
• 8-Story Antigravity Forest Facade Takes Root
• Time Magazine: The liberal bias of facts. – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
• The Top 5 Lies About Obama's Health Care Reform
• The burden of debt.
• Why markets can’t cure healthcare.
• The Swiss Menace
• Better world: Legalise drugs
• Senate Votes to Stop Stealth Jets, Continue Pentagon Overhaul
• NSA surveillance program too secret for its own good.
• FBI compounds mystery with secret justification of gag order.
• US rogue nuke detection upgrades not worth the cost.
• Secrets, Leaks, and Outright Lies
• How to Stack a Rocket – The Ares I-X test vehicle takes shape, even as the program faces funding disaster.
• ATK test fires Ares 1 five-segment booster.
• Augustine appears before Congress about space review.
• Augustine panel presents five manned space options.
• ULA claim gap reducing solution via EELV exploration master plan – They might be proposing a great plan, but, on the other hand, when have our aerospace contractors ever tried not to steer billions of taxpayer dollars into their coffers?
• Tentative Signs of Water Found on Moon
• How to Land Safely Back on the Moon – Thanks to Jay Lake.
• Back from the Moon, Apollo Astronauts Had to Go Through Customs
• Historic Apollo landing sites imaged by new lunar orbiter.
• NASA reacquires original Moon landing footage.
• NASA High Definition Video: Partially Restored Apollo 11 Video.
• Mars, methane and mysteries.
• Cracks on Mars hint at dried-up lakes.
• Too much radiation for astronauts to make it to Mars – Not exactly new information, but it bears repeating.
• Rare meteorite found by 'fireball' observatory.
• "Green" propellant could give rockets--and the environment--a boost. – Aluminum and ice. Very nice.
• Armadillo Aerospace qualifies to win Lunar Lander Challenge level 2 – Congratulations!
• Students snap images of Earth from space for $150.
• Timeless Tom Baker Makes Return Trip to Doctor Who

Weekend Links

• The Dirt on Biofuels – There's also this Guardian article, and a summary of a few more related articles can be found in Carfree Times no. 51, in the section titled "Rich Drivers Starving Poor Families."
• Latest Efficiency Directive: Low-Resistance Tires – Good idea. (Naturally, the tire industry opposes it.) And while we're legislating about tires, could we follow European standards and limit their maximum sound output to 70 dB? I've routinely measured more than 80 dB from cars on a 30 mph road at one of my bus stops. That's a significant civic noise pollution source.
• Did the Rat Island restoration effort kill 41 bald eagles? – Getting rid of the rats was still a good idea.
• Why Japan's whaling activities are not research – Not that there was any doubt.
• NASA Successfully Launches LRO/LCROSS for Return to the Moon
• SpaceX Update: Falcon 9 Flight 1 – Encouraging progress. Good luck, folks.
• Wayne Hale: Its your choice, really – On the value of exploration. If some of the logic is left a bit fuzzy, it's made up for by the Chinese history lesson.
• Grey hair may be protecting us from cancer – Oh, well, that's all right then.
• Sleeping on a complex decision may be a bad choice
• Smaller reactor design for fusion may work in a "pinch" – Another potential route to fusion power. So, is research in this direction getting all of the funding it needs, or are we keeping all of our eggs in the ITER basket?
• Physicists create 'black hole for sound'
• The Rain's Maintained Speed Strain Is Now Explained – Rain? I've heard of that....
• Nine extraordinary clouds
• University claims Apple's glossy screens may cause injury – Can't stand those pro-glare screens, personally. And, yes, I've seen them used at awkward angles to try to avoid the glare/reflection problem. That's bad on the face of it, but the absurdity is compounded by the fact that all LCD displays have limited viewing angles (some very limited, especially on lower-cost equipment), beyond which many severely distort, or even invert, the colors they display. Which, to my mind, puts the lie to the "glossy screens look better" claim. Under ideal circumstances, they may look better, but in the real world, things are more complicated.
• Pentagon Wants Cyborg Insects to Sniff WMD, Offer Free Wi-Fi
• Krugman: The Big Hate – And some related items bear mentioning: McVeigh did not act alone, there was Terry Nichols, and there've been suggestions of militia groups providing support, as well. Then there was the maniac who crashed a light aircraft into the White House. And the maniac who sprayed the White House with (if memory serves) AK-47 fire. I believe there were other incidents in that period, but the specifics aren't springing to mind.

Weekend Links

• FBI Use of Patriot Act Authority Increased Dramatically in 2008 – Warrants? We don't need no steenkin' warrants. Oh, and have a life-time gag order … because nothing says democracy like a lifetime of legally compelled silence.
• FTC nukes "extended warranty" robocallers from orbit – Couldn't happen to nicer people.
• "Air fuelled" battery tech invented in Scotland
• Elderly Who Forget Age Remember Better – If you aren't thinking that your brain is running down, it's a lot less likely to act run down.
• Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans – Now they tell me?
• "Junk" DNA Has Important Role, Researchers Find
• Origin of life: building an RNA world from simple chemicals
• Mockingbirds quickly recognize repeat human intruders – Hassling people takes a lot of energy, so mockingbirds make sure they only hassle the people that they already know are troublemakers.
• DARPA to try out goose v-formation trick with jets
• Hypersonic 'WaveRider' Poised for Test Flight – Try that you darn geese.
• Into the Blue – Testing Orion recovery amid nine foot waves in the Atlantic Ocean.
• Kepler spacecraft begins its search for habitable worlds
• Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to peer into history
• NASA Details Plans for Lunar Exploration Robotic Missions
• Weird New NASA Rovers Really Get Around – Most of NASA's ideas never get a chance to fly, but it's interesting to see what the boffins are up to. (For some intriguing past examples take a look at JPL's Inflatable Rover Program.)