To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It | Philip K. Howard| theatlantic.com

Successful schools don't have a formula, other than that teachers and principals are free to follow their instincts.

America's schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower.

Schools are human institutions. Their effectiveness depends upon engaging the interest and focus of each student. A good teacher, studies show, can dramatically improve the learning of students. What do great teachers have in common? Nothing, according to studies -- nothing, that is, except a commitment to teaching and a knack for keeping the students engaged (see especially The Moral Life of Schools). Good teachers don't emerge spontaneously, and training and mentoring are indispensable. But ultimately, effective teaching seems to hinge on, more than any other factor, the personality of the teacher. Skilled teachers have a power to engage their students -- with spontaneity, authority, and wit.

Good teachers typically are found in schools with good cultures. Experts say you can tell if a school is effective within five minutes of walking in. Students are orderly and respectful when changing classes; there's a steady hum of activity. Good school culture typically grows out of good leadership. Here as well, there are many variations of success. KIPP schools have a formula that includes, for students, longer hours and strict accountability to core values, and, for teachers, a cooperative role in developing school activities and pedagogy. David Brooks recently described a highly successful school in Brooklyn that abandons the teacher-in-front-of-class model in favor of collaborative learning. Students sit around larger tables trying to solve problems or discuss the task at hand. In every successful school, whatever its theory of education, a good culture sweeps everyone along, as if by a strong tide, towards common goals of discovery and learning.

Successful teaching and good school cultures don't have a formula, but they have a necessary condition: teachers and principals must feel free to act on their best instincts. Minute by minute, as they respond to students and each other, their focus must be on doing what's right. Humans can only focus on one thing at a time, sociologist Robert Merton observed. That's why it's vital for teachers to be thinking only about how to communicate the lesson to the students in front of them. Any diversion of this focus is apt to be seen as indifference or boredom, and will break the magic.

This is why we must bulldoze school bureaucracy. It is a giant diversion, focused on compliance to please some administrator far away. Every minute spent filling out a form or worrying about compliance interferes with the human interaction that is the essence of effective teaching.

Law is everywhere in schools. It permeates every nook and cranny. Teachers spend hours every week filling out forms that no one ever reads -- because the laws and regulations that have piled up over the years require them. Hardly any interaction is free of legal implications. Teachers are instructed never -- never ever -- to put an arm around a crying child: the school might get sued. Misbehavior and disrespect are met with weakness and resignation; teachers are trained to be stoics, tolerating disorder rather than running the risk of a due process hearing in which the teacher, not the student, must justify her decision. Principals suffer a similar inversion of authority with teachers, who are armed with hundreds of pages of work rules that prescribe exactly what teachers can be asked to do. Managing a school -- say, setting the hours, deciding how to spend the budget, and deciding which teachers are doing the job --is an oxymoron. Public schools today are, by law, basically unmanageable.

Throw onto the legal pile a mono-minded compulsion -- complete with legal penalties -- to satisfy minimum standardized test scores. Recess has been canceled, arts and humanities courses scrapped, and creative interaction replaced by rote drills -- largely because of one law, known as No Child Left Behind. Another unintended effect of focusing only on the lowest performers is that all the all the other students get left behind. Teachers are treated like machine tools, their personalities and passions extruded through rigid drilling protocols. Demoralization has never been considered a good management strategy, but that's what NCLB has accomplished. One teacher in Florida put it this way: I love teaching, I love kids, but it's become harder and harder when you're teaching to the test. Can you hear the discouragement in my voice?

America's schools face many external challenges, particularly the breakdown of the nuclear family and an imbedded underclass. But numerous public, charter, and parochial schools succeed notwithstanding these challenges. What all these successful schools have in common is that somehow, usually with strong leadership, they figure out how to repress the bureaucracy and unleash the human spirit. We have a great deal of freedom here, observed a teacher at a successful school studied by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, because the principal protects his faculty from 'the arbitrary regulations of the central authority.'

The organizational flaw in America's schools is that they are too organized. Bureaucracy can't teach. American schools have been organized on the totally erroneous assumption, management expert Peter Drucker observed, that there is one right way to learn and it is the same for everyone. We must give educators freedom to be themselves. This doesn't mean they should be unaccountable. But they should be accountable for overall success, including, especially, success at socialization of students through a healthy school culture, not just objective test scores. This requires scrapping the current system -- all of it, federal, state, and local, as well as union contracts. We must start over and rebuild an open framework in which real people can find inspiration in doing things their own way.

This article available online at:

http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/to-fix-americas-education-b...

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

Climate mythology: The Gulf Stream, European climate and Abrupt Change

Climate mythology: The Gulf Stream, European climate and Abrupt Change Richard Seager Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University

A few times a year the British media of all stripes goes into a tizzy of panic when one climate scientist or another states that there is a possibility that the North Atlantic ocean circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is a major part, will slow down in coming years or even stop. Whether the scientists statements are measured or inflammatory the media invariably warns that this will plunge Britain and Europe into a new ice age, pictures of the icy shores of Labrador are shown, created film of English Channel ferries making their way through sea ice are broadcast... And so the circus continues year after year. Here is one example.

The Gulf Stream-European climate myth The panic is based on a long held belief of the British, other Europeans, Americans and, indeed, much of the world's population that the northward heat transport by the Gulf Stream is the reason why western Europe enjoys a mild climate, much milder than, say, that of eastern North America. This idea was actually originated by an American military man, Matthew Fontaine Maury, in the mid nineteenth century and has stuck since despite the absence of proof.

We now know this is a myth, the climatological equivalent of an urban legend. In a detailed study published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2002, we demonstrated the limited role that ocean heat transport plays in determining regional climates around the Atlantic Ocean. Popular versions of this story can be found here, here and, in French, here.

The determinants of North Atlantic regional climates We showed that there are three processes that need to be evaluated:

1. The ocean absorbs heat in summer and releases it in winter. Regions that are downwind of oceans in winter will have mild climates. This process does not require ocean currents or ocean heat transport. 2. The atmosphere moves heat poleward and warm climates where the heat converges. In additions, the waviness in the atmospheric flow creates warm climates where the air flows poleward and cold climates where it flows equatorward. 3. The ocean moves heat poleward and will warm climates where it releases heat and the atmosphere picks it up and moves it onto land.

Using observations and climate models we found that, at the latitudes of Europe, the atmospheric heat transport exceeds that of the ocean by several fold. In winter it may even by an order of magnitude greater. Thus it is the atmosphere, not the ocean, that does the lion's share of the work ameliorating winter climates in the extratropics. We also found that the seasonal absorption and release of heat by the ocean has a much larger impact on regional climates than does the movement of heat by ocean currents.

Seasonal storage and release accounts for half the winter temperature difference across the North Atlantic Ocean. But the 500 pound gorilla in how regional climates are determined around the Atlantic turned out to be the Rocky Mountains. Because of the need to conserve angular momentum, as air flows from the west across the mountains it is forced to first turn south and then to turn north further downstream. As such the mountains force cold air south into eastern North America and warm air north into western Europe. This waviness in the flow is responsible for the other half of the temperature difference across the North Atlantic Ocean.

Hence:

1. Fifty percent of the winter temperature difference across the North Atlantic is caused by the eastward atmospheric transport of heat released by the ocean that was absorbed and stored in the summer. 2. Fifty percent is caused by the stationary waves of the atmospheric flow. 3. The ocean heat transport contributes a small warming across the basin.

The seasonal ocean heat storage and pattern of atmospheric heat transport add up to make winters in western Europe 15 to 20 degrees C warmer than those in eastern North America. A very similar process occurs across the Pacific Ocean. The ocean heat transport warms the North Atlantic Ocean and the land on both sides by a modest few degrees C. The only place where the ocean heat transport fundamentally alters climate is along the coast of northern Norway which would be sea ice-covered were it not for the warm northward flowing Norwegian Current.

The Gulf Stream and future climate change A slowdown of the Gulf Stream and ocean circulation in the future, induced by freshening of the waters caused by anthropogenic climate change (via melting glaciers and increased water vapor transport into high latitudes) or simply by warming, would thus introduce a modest cooling tendency. This would leave the temperature contrast across the Atlantic unchanged and not plunge Europe back into the ice age or anything like it. In fact the cooling tendency would probably be overwhelmed by the direct radiatively-driven warming by rising greenhouse gases.

North Atlantic Ocean circulation and abrupt climate change The conflation of the Gulf Stream, ocean heat transport and Europe's climate has led to changes in ocean circulation being the reigning theory of the cause of glacial era abrupt climate change. These abrupt changes - the Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last ice age and the Younger Dryas cold reversal of the last deglaciation - are well recorded in the Greenland ice core and Europe and involved changes in winter temperature of as much as thirty degrees C! For the Younger Dryas it has been proposed that the sudden release of glacial meltwater from ice dammed Lake Agassiz freshened the North Atlantic and shut down the overturning circulation causing dramatic regional coooling.

Only through an inflated view of the impact of ocean circulation could it be thought that the enormous glacial era abrupt changes were caused by changes in ocean circulation. Instead, as we have argued, changes in atmospheric circulation regimes had to be the driver, see (Seager and Battisti,2007). Determining how this could happen has become more of a priority now that the geological evidence for the Lake Agassiz flood has not been found, see (Broecker,2006).

Moving beyond the myth It is long time that the Gulf Stream-European climate myth was resigned to the graveyard of defunct misconceptions along with the Earth being flat and the sun going around the Earth. In its place we need serious assessments of how changes in ocean circulation will impact climate change and a new look at the problem of abrupt climate change that gives the tropical climate system and the atmosphere their due as the primary drivers of regional climates around the world.

Publications

Seager, R., D. S. Battisti, J. Yin, N. Gordon, N. H. Naik, A. C. Clement and M. A. Cane, 2002: Is the Gulf Stream responsible for Europe's mild winters? Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 128(586): 2563-2586. PDF Seager, R. and D. S. Battisti, 2007: Challenges to our understanding of the general circulation: abrupt climate change. In: T. Schneider and A.S. Sobel (Editors), The Global Circulation of the Atmosphere: Phenomena, Theory, Challenges. Princeton University Press, pp. 331-371. PDF. Seager, R., 2006: The source of Europe's mild climate. American Scientist, 94(4): 334-341. PDF. Seager, R., 2008: Setting the record straight on Europe's mild winters. The Plantsman, Royal Horticultural Society,7, Part 1 March, p.22-27. PDF. Seager, R., 2003: Gulf Stream la fin d'un mythe. La Recherche(361): 40-46.PDF

The American Heat Wave and Global Warming | scietopia Blog

Global warming is a big issue. If we're honest and we look carefully at the data, it's beyond question that the atmosphere of our planet is warming. It's also beyond any honest question that the preponderance of the evidence is that human behavior is the primary cause. It's not impossible that we're wrong - but when we look at the real evidence, it's overwhelming.

Of course, this doesn't stop people from being idiots.

But what I'm going to focus on here isn't exactly the usual idiots. See, here in the US, we're in the middle of a dramatic heat wave. All over the country, we've been breaking heat daily temperature records. As I write this, it's 98 degrees outside here in NY, and we're expecting another couple of degrees. Out in the west, there are gigantic wildfires, cause by poor snowfall last winter, poor rainfall this spring, and record heat to dry everything out. So: is this global warming?

We're seeing lots and lots of people saying yes. Or worse, saying that it is, because of the heat wave, while pretending that they're not really saying that it is. For one, among all-too-many examples, you can look at Bad Astronomy here. Not to rag too much on Phil though, because hes just one among about two dozen different example of this that I've seen in the last 3 days.

Weather 10 or twenty degree above normal isn't global warming. A heat wave, even a massive epic heat wave, isn't proof that global warming is real, any more than an epic cold wave or blizzard is evidence that global warming is fake.

I'm sure you've heard many people say weather is not climate. But for human beings, it's really hard to understand just what that really means. Climate is a world-wide long-term average; weather is instantaneous and local. This isn't just a nitpick: it's a huge distinction. When we talk about global warming, what we're talking about is the year-round average temperature changing by one or two degrees. A ten degree variation in local weather doesn't tell us anything about the worldwide trend.

Global warming is about climate. And part of what that means is that in some places, global warming will probably make the weather colder. Cold weather isn't evidence against global warming. Most people realize that - which is why we all laugh when gasbags like Rush Limbaugh talk about how a snowstorm proves that global warming is a fraud. But at the same time, we look at weather like what we have in the US, and conclude that Yes, global warming is real . But we're making the same mistake.

Global warming is about a surprisingly small change. Over the last hundred years, global warming is a change of about 1 degree Celsius in the global average temperature. That's about 1 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit, for us Americans. It seems miniscule, and it's a tiny fraction of the temperature difference that we're seeing this summer in the US.

But that tiny difference in climate can cause huge differences in weather. As I mentioned before, it can make local weather either warmer or colder - not just by directly warming the air, but by altering wind and water currents in ways that create dramatic changes.

For example, global warming could, likely, make Europe significantly colder. How? The weather in western Europe is greatly affected by an ocean water current called the atlantic conveyor. The conveyor is a cyclic ocean current, where (driven in part by the jet stream), warm water flows north from the equator in a surface current, cooling as it goes, until it finally sinks and starts to cycle back south in a deep underwater current. This acts as a heat pump, moving energy from the equator north and east to western Europe. This is why Western Europe is significantly warmer than places at the same latitude in Eastern North America.

Global warming could alter the flow of the Atlantic conveyor. (We don't know if it will - but it's one possibility, which makes a good example of something counter-intuitive.) If the conveyor is slowed, so that it transfers less energy, Europe will get colder. How could the conveyor be slowed? By ice-melt. The conveyor works as a cycle because of the differences in density between warm and cold water: cold water is denser than warm water, so the cold water sinks as it cools. It warms in the tropics, gets pushed north by the jet stream, cools along the way and gradually sinks.

But global warming is melting a lot of Arctic and glacier ice, which produces freshwater. Freshwater is less dense than saltwater. So the freshwater, when it dilutes the cold water at the northern end of the conveyor, it reduces its density relative to the pure salt-water - and that reduces the tendency of the cold water to sink, which could slow the conveyor.

There are numerous similar phenomena that involve changes in ocean currents and wind due to relatively small temperature variations. El Nino and La Nina, conveyor changes, changes in the moisture-carrying capacity of wind currents to carry - they're all caused by relatively small changes - changes well with the couple of degrees of variation that we see occurring.

But we need to be honest and careful. This summer may be incredibly hot, and we had an unusually warm winter before it - but we really shouldn't try to use that as evidence of global warming. Because if you do, when some colder-than-normal weather occurs somewhere, the cranks and liars that want to convince people that global warming is an elaborate fraud will use that the muddle things - and when they do, it'll be our fault when people fall for it, because we'll be the ones who primed them for that argument. As nice, as convenient, as convincing as it might seem to draw a correlation between a specific instance of extreme weather and global warming, we really need to stop doing it.

What Really Makes Us Fat By GARY TAUBES | New York Times

June 30, 2012

A CALORIE is a calorie. This truism has been the foundation of nutritional wisdom and our beliefs about obesity since the 1960s.

What it means is that a calorie of protein will generate the same energy when metabolized in a living organism as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. When talking about obesity or why we get fat, evoking the phrase “a calorie is a calorie” is almost invariably used to imply that what we eat is relatively unimportant. We get fat because we take in more calories than we expend; we get lean if we do the opposite. Anyone who tells you otherwise, by this logic, is trying to sell you something.

But not everyone buys this calorie argument, and the dispute erupted in full force again last week. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a clinical trial by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and his collaborators. While the media tended to treat the study as another diet trial — what should we eat to maintain weight loss? — it spoke to a far more fundamental issue: What actually causes obesity? Why do we get fat in the first place? Too many calories? Or something else?

The calorie-is-a-calorie notion dates to 1878, when the great German nutritionist Max Rubner established what he called the isodynamic law.

It was applied to obesity in the early 1900s by another German — Carl Von Noorden, who was of two minds on the subject. One of his theories suggested that common obesity was all about calories in minus calories out; another, that it was about how the body partitions those calories, either for energy or into storage.

This has been the core of the controversy ever since, and it’s never gone away. If obesity is a fuel-partitioning problem — a fat-storage defect — then the trigger becomes not the quantity of food available but the quality. Now carbohydrates in the diet become the prime suspects, especially refined and easily digestible carbohydrates (foods that have what’s called a high glycemic index) and sugars.

UNTIL the 1960s, carbohydrates were indeed considered a likely suspect in obesity: “Every woman knows that carbohydrate is fattening,” as two British dietitians began a 1963 British Journal of Nutrition article.

The obvious mechanism: carbohydrates stimulate secretion of the hormone insulin, which works, among other things, to store fat in our fat cells. At the time, though, the conventional wisdom was beginning its shift: obesity was becoming an energy issue.

Carbohydrates, with less than half the calories per gram as fat, were beginning their official transformation into heart-healthy diet foods. One reason we’ve been told since to eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets is this expectation that they’ll keep us thin.

What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. First they took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight. Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back. Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same. This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss. The belief is that weight loss causes “metabolic adaptations,” which make it almost inevitable that the weight will return. Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them. But now the subjects were rotated through three very different diets, one month for each. They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of the diets was very different.

One diet was low-fat and thus high in carbohydrates. This was the diet we’re all advised to eat: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean sources of protein. One diet had a low glycemic index: fewer carbohydrates in total, and those that were included were slow to be digested — from beans, non-starchy vegetables and other minimally processed sources. The third diet was Atkins, which is very low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein.

The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss. These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. Eight of the 21 subjects expended more than they did at their full weights — the opposite of the predicted metabolic compensation.

On the very low-carbohydrate diet, Dr. Ludwig’s subjects expended 300 more calories a day than they did on the low-fat diet and 150 calories more than on the low-glycemic-index diet. As Dr. Ludwig explained, when the subjects were eating low-fat diets, they’d have to add an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity each day to expend as much energy as they would effortlessly on the very-low-carb diet. And this while consuming the same amount of calories. If the physical activity made them hungrier — a likely assumption — maintaining weight on the low-fat, high-carb diet would be even harder. Why does this speak to the very cause of obesity? One way to think about this is to consider weight-reduced subjects as “pre-obese.” They’re almost assuredly going to get fatter, and so they can be research stand-ins — perhaps the best we have — for those of us who are merely predisposed to get fat but haven’t done so yet and might take a few years or decades longer to do it.

If we think of Dr. Ludwig’s subjects as pre-obese, then the study tells us that the nutrient composition of the diet can trigger the predisposition to get fat, independent of the calories consumed. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the more easily we remain lean. The more carbohydrates, the more difficult. In other words, carbohydrates are fattening, and obesity is a fat-storage defect. What matters, then, is the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume and their effect on insulin.

From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.

A controversial conclusion? Absolutely, and Dr. Ludwig’s results are by no means ironclad. The diets should be fed for far longer than one month, something he hopes to do in a follow-up study. As in any science, these experiments should be replicated by independent investigators. We’ve been arguing about this for over a century. Let’s put it to rest with more good science. The public health implications are enormous.

Gary Taubes is The author of “Why We Get Fat.”

Linux grabs its single biggest win | Jack Wallen TechRepublic

By Jack Wallen June 18, 2012, 7:48 AM PDT

Takeaway: The U.S. Navy and Dept. of Defense have learned valuable lessons that translate to huge contracts for the Linux OS. What does this mean for open source and the community that drives it? Jack Wallen offers his take.

Northrop Grumman Transformational Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle system. Ever hear of it? It’s a U.S. Navy drone, otherwise known as the MQ-8B Fire Scout. Why is it significant? Because recently the Navy decided to drop the Windows operating system that was running in favor of Linux. And just why did they drop the previous operating system?

A virus.

That’s right…previously a virus had infected the operating system on the U.S. Air Force’s drone control system.

A virus…on the system controlling drones. Think about it. Imagine the consequences of a drone or fighter plane suffering from a computer virus — while armed! That was a significant enough “oops” to lead the U.S. Navy to migrate their drone systems from Windows to Linux.

When I read this, I was shocked. First and foremost, I couldn’t believe such planes were controlled by anything powered with any flavor of the Windows operating system — not when the U.S. Navy has enough intelligence and resources to even create their own OS. Once that shock flushed from my system, I had to wonder…who would be the one to run Combofix on the systems running those drones? What a horrible job that would be…having to take the fall for an infected computer system on a military aircraft.

Anyway…I digress.

The decision brings a 28 million dollar contract to the Linux community (who, exactly, will be getting this contract is unknown), but that is not all. Based on this (and other issues) with non-free software, the U.S. Department of Defense is laying out guidelines on how its agencies can use open source code. And even though the DOD’s use of open source code will alter the GPL for said code (they can’t, for obvious reasons, release any code they use and modify back into the wild), this is a huge deal for open source everywhere.

Think about it. The DOD has decided that open source is a more secure and reliable route than proprietary systems. That trickle down is going to have a serious, lasting effect in the world of Linux. Here’s how I see this working:

DOD begins Linux roll out US Government begins wide-spread roll out Civilian security companies world-wide begin roll out Universities fall in line Consumers begin clamoring for better security on their OS

Although this could seem like a pipe dream (for this to rain down upon the consumers), if the masses really want to start getting serious about their security (and they should), this should be a lesson from up high that should not be taken lightly.

Windows is a good desktop operating system — but one with many, serious security flaws. And although Microsoft is doing their best to tighten it all down, it’s simply and fundamentally insecure. The U.S. Navy and Department of Defense get this now. Maybe it’s time for the consumer to pick up on that thread and demand Linux on their desktops.

After all, if it’s good enough for the DOD and the Navy, isn’t it good enough for you?

I can already hear the naysayers proclaiming their usual litany of hate and doubt.

“Not enough games!” “No support!” “It doesn’t run ‘X’!”

Well, guess what, if there’s enough demand for it, eventually those complaints will fade away. Think of it like a relationship — you want to start a long term relationship built on a foundation of stability, friendship, and trust. Why? Because eventually the bedroom antics will dissipate and what remains will have to carry you into your twilight. Wouldn’t you rather have an operating system built on that same, strong foundation? Your love of games will eventually fade away. If your platform is solid and secure, you’ll enjoy it for many years to come. And if more people begin enjoying the Linux platform, eventually the games and the support and ‘X’ will arrive as well.

The U.S. Navy saw this.

Be the Navy.

About Jack Wallen

A writer for over 12 years, Jack's primary focus is on the Linux operating system and its effects on the open source and non-open source communities.

Linux grabs its single biggest win | Jack Wallen TechRepublic

By Jack Wallen June 18, 2012, 7:48 AM PDT

Takeaway: The U.S. Navy and Dept. of Defense have learned valuable lessons that translate to huge contracts for the Linux OS. What does this mean for open source and the community that drives it? Jack Wallen offers his take.

Northrop Grumman Transformational Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle system. Ever hear of it? It’s a U.S. Navy drone, otherwise known as the MQ-8B Fire Scout. Why is it significant? Because recently the Navy decided to drop the Windows operating system that was running in favor of Linux. And just why did they drop the previous operating system?

A virus.

That’s right…previously a virus had infected the operating system on the U.S. Air Force’s drone control system.

A virus…on the system controlling drones. Think about it. Imagine the consequences of a drone or fighter plane suffering from a computer virus — while armed! That was a significant enough “oops” to lead the U.S. Navy to migrate their drone systems from Windows to Linux.

When I read this, I was shocked. First and foremost, I couldn’t believe such planes were controlled by anything powered with any flavor of the Windows operating system — not when the U.S. Navy has enough intelligence and resources to even create their own OS. Once that shock flushed from my system, I had to wonder…who would be the one to run Combofix on the systems running those drones? What a horrible job that would be…having to take the fall for an infected computer system on a military aircraft.

Anyway…I digress.

The decision brings a 28 million dollar contract to the Linux community (who, exactly, will be getting this contract is unknown), but that is not all. Based on this (and other issues) with non-free software, the U.S. Department of Defense is laying out guidelines on how its agencies can use open source code. And even though the DOD’s use of open source code will alter the GPL for said code (they can’t, for obvious reasons, release any code they use and modify back into the wild), this is a huge deal for open source everywhere.

Think about it. The DOD has decided that open source is a more secure and reliable route than proprietary systems. That trickle down is going to have a serious, lasting effect in the world of Linux. Here’s how I see this working:

DOD begins Linux roll out US Government begins wide-spread roll out Civilian security companies world-wide begin roll out Universities fall in line Consumers begin clamoring for better security on their OS

Although this could seem like a pipe dream (for this to rain down upon the consumers), if the masses really want to start getting serious about their security (and they should), this should be a lesson from up high that should not be taken lightly.

Windows is a good desktop operating system — but one with many, serious security flaws. And although Microsoft is doing their best to tighten it all down, it’s simply and fundamentally insecure. The U.S. Navy and Department of Defense get this now. Maybe it’s time for the consumer to pick up on that thread and demand Linux on their desktops.

After all, if it’s good enough for the DOD and the Navy, isn’t it good enough for you?

I can already hear the naysayers proclaiming their usual litany of hate and doubt.

“Not enough games!” “No support!” “It doesn’t run ‘X’!”

Well, guess what, if there’s enough demand for it, eventually those complaints will fade away. Think of it like a relationship — you want to start a long term relationship built on a foundation of stability, friendship, and trust. Why? Because eventually the bedroom antics will dissipate and what remains will have to carry you into your twilight. Wouldn’t you rather have an operating system built on that same, strong foundation? Your love of games will eventually fade away. If your platform is solid and secure, you’ll enjoy it for many years to come. And if more people begin enjoying the Linux platform, eventually the games and the support and ‘X’ will arrive as well.

The U.S. Navy saw this.

Be the Navy.

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About Jack Wallen

A writer for over 12 years, Jack's primary focus is on the Linux operating system and its effects on the open source and non-open source communities.

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Why The Economy Can’t Get Out of First Gear | ROBERT B. REICH,

TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 2012

Rarely in history has the cause of a major economic problem been so clear yet have so few been willing to see it.

The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe’s debt crisis. It’s not Japan’s tsumami. It’s not Wall Street’s continuing excesses. It’s economists tell us, because taxes are too high oñ corporations and the rich, and safety nets are too generous to the needy. It’s not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn’t spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus.

The answer is in front of our faces. It’s because American consumers, whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity, don’t have the dough to buy enough to boost the economy – and they can no longer borrow like they could before the crash of 2008.

If you have any doubt, just take a look at the Survey of Consumer Finances, released Monday

Reserve. Median family income was $49,600 in 2007. By 2010 it was $45,800 – a drop of 7.7%.

All of the gains from economic growth have been going to the richest 1 percent – who, because they’re so rich, spend no more than half what they take in.

Can I say this any more simply? The earnings of the great American middle class fueled

expansion for three decades after World War II. Their relative lack of earnings in more recent years set us up for the great American bust.

Starting around 1980, globalization and automation began exerting downward pressure on median wages. Employers began busting unions in order to make more profits. And increasingly deregulated financial markets began taking over the real economy.

The result was slower wage growth for most households. Women surged into paid work in order to prop up family incomes – which helped for a time. But the median wage kept flattening, and then, after 2001, began to decline.

Households tried to keep up by going deeply into debt, using the rising values of their homes as collateral. This also helped – for a time. But then the housing bubble popped.

The Fed’s latest report shows how loud that pop was. Between 2007 and 2010 (the latest data available) American families’ median net worth fell almost 40 percent – down to levels last seen in 1992. The typical family’s wealth is their home, not their stock portfolio – and housing values have dropped by a third since 2006.

Families have also become less confident about how much income they can expect in the future. In 2010, over 35% of American families said they did not “have a good idea of what their income would be for the next year.” That’s up from 31.4% in 2007.

But because their incomes and their net worth have both dropped, families are saving less.

families that said they had saved in the preceding year fell from 56.4% in 2007 to 52% in 2010, the lowest level since the Fed began collecting that information in 1992.

Bottom line: The American economy is still struggling because the vast American middle class can’t spend more to get it out of first gear.

What to do? There’s no simple answer in the short term except to hope we stay in first gear and don`t slide backwards.

Over the longer term the answer is to make sure the middle class gets far more of the gains from economic growth.

How? We might learn something from history. During the 1920s, income concentrated at the top. By 1928, the top 1 percent was raking in an astounding 23.94 percent of the total (close to the 23.5 percent the top 1 percent got in 2007) according to analyses of tax records by my colleague Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. At that point the bubble popped and we fell into the Great Depression.

But then came the Wagner Act, requiring employers to bargain in good faith with organized labor. Social Security and unemployment insurance.

Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. A national minimum wage. And to contain Wall Street: The Securities Act and Glass-Steagall Act.

In 1941 America went to war – a vast mobilization that employed every able-bodied adult and put money in their pockets. And after the war, the GI Bill, sending millions of returning veterans to college. A vast expansion of public higher education. and infrastructure investments, such as the National Defense Highway Act. Taxes on the rich remained at least 70 percent until 1981.

The result: By 1957, the top 1 percent of Americans raked in only 10.1 percent of total income. Most of the rest went to a growing middle class – whose members fueled the greatest economic boom in the history of the world.

Get it? We won’t get out of first gear until the middle class regains the bargaining power it had in the first three decades after World War II to claim a much larger share of the gains from productivity growth.

Virginia's dying marshes and climate change denial | Daniel Nasaw BBC News Magazine

5 June 2012 Last updated at 20:12 ET
By Daniel Nasaw BBC News Magazine
York River, Virginia

Dying wetland trees along Virginia's coastline are evidence that rising sea levels threaten nature and humans, scientists say - and show the limits of political action amid climate change scepticism.

Dead trees loom over the marsh like the bones of a whale beached long ago.

In the salt marshes along the banks of the York River in the US state of Virginia, pine and cedar trees and bushes of holly and wax myrtle occupy small islands, known as hummocks.

But as the salty estuary waters have risen in recent years, they have drowned the trees on the hummocks' lower edges. If - when - the sea level rises further, it will inundate and drown the remaining trees and shrubs, and eventually sink the entire marsh.

That threatens the entire surrounding ecosystem, because fish, oysters and crabs depend on the marsh grass for food.

These are just the early warning signs of what's coming, says avian ecologist Bryan Watts, stepping carefully among the fallen pines.

The sea level in the Chesapeake Bay area and in south-eastern Virginia is predicted to rise by as much as 5.2ft (1.6m) by the end of the century.

Ancient geologic forces are causing the land literally to sink, while the amount of water in the oceans is increasing because of global warming, scientists say.

As a result, the low-lying coastal areas - and the towns in it - are at tremendous risk of flooding.

To address the problem, climate scientists, environmentalists and their political supporters say the US must dramatically reduce its fossil fuel emissions, while also taking steps to lessen the impact of coastal flooding and wetland erosion.

There is time to turn the ship around, says Michael Mann, a former University of Virginia climate scientist, but there is not a whole lot of time.

But in Virginia's state capital Richmond, as in Washington, many politicians remain sceptical about the extent to which humans are responsible for global warming.

They fear measures needed to curb climate change would hurt the economy, threaten private property, and harm commercial and industrial interests.

Here in Virginia there is very little political will to address the mitigation side of things - reducing our carbon footprint, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says Carl Hershner, who studies coastal resources management at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

There is a high degree of scepticism in the political and the general public.

Virginia's attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli, has waged an aggressive public battle against the Obama administration's efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, which he said would drive up electricity costs and kill jobs in the state's coal industry.

While politicians in Washington and in Richmond, Virginia's state capital, have done little to address the problem, authorities along Virginia's coast have watched the waters rise and have been forced to take action.

The city government of Norfolk spends about $6m (£3.8m) a year to elevate roads, improve drainage, and help homeowners literally raise their houses to keep their ground floors dry, says Assistant City Manager Ron Williams.

About 5%-10% of the city's lowest-lying neighbourhoods are subject to heavy flooding during storms. City planners do not currently recommend any areas be abandoned to the tide, but you have to have the conversation as you look 50 years out , Mr Williams says.

At Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval base, the US Navy is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to replace aging piers with new ones better able to withstand the rising water.

Sea level rise was having a measurable impact on the readiness of the ships, says retired Capt Joseph Bouchard, who was commander of the base from 2000-2003. And that's unacceptable.

So the Navy decided to replace the old piers with double-decked piers - one for utilities, the other for the ship operations - with the upper deck 21ft above current sea level.

Were it not for sea level rise caused by climate change, the Navy could have replaced those piers with single deck piers at much much less cost, he says.

Even a measure as ostensibly mild as funding for a flooding study was fraught with climate change politics.

Senator Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and Chris Stolle, a Republican member of the Virginia's lower House of Delegates, this year shepherded a resolution through the legislature spending $50,000 on a comprehensive study of the economic impact of coastal flooding on the Virginia and to investigate ways to adapt.

To pass the bill, at Stolle's suggestion Northam excised the words relative sea level rise from an initial draft of the bill, replacing them with recurrent flooding in the final version.

Stolle says the change was necessary to ensure the bill focused on the issues Virginia politicians can handle - flooding - and not those they cannot address - global warming. In any case, the jury's still out on mankind' s contribution to global warming, he says.

Other folks can go argue about sea-level rise and global warming, Stolle says. What matters is people's homes are getting destroyed, and that's what we want to focus on. To think that we are going to stop climate change is absolute hubris. The climate is going to change whether we're here or not.

Northam describes the change in language as pragmatic politics - necessary to win support from conservatives sceptical of climate change science.

If you mention climate change to them, it's like a big red flag, he says. A barrier goes up. That's the way it is here in the Virginia.

BBC © 2012

Science Denial Is a Large and Growing Problem | Ryan Cooper Washington Monthly

June 11, 2012 3:06 PM

Kevin Drum isn’t happy with the latest talk around the long-running evolution belief survey, and people wringing their hands over the fact that nearly half of American’s espouse a recent creationism view when it comes to humankind:

Come on. This 46% number has barely budged over the past three decades, and I’m willing to bet it was at least as high back in the 50s and early 60s, that supposed golden age of comity and bipartisanship. It simply has nothing to do with whether we can all get along and nothing to do with whether we can construct a civil discourse.

The fact is that belief in evolution has virtually no real-life impact on anything. That’s why 46% of the country can safely choose not to believe it: their lack of belief has precisely zero effect on their lives. Sure, it’s a handy way of saying that they’re God-fearing Christians — a “cultural signifier,” as Andrew puts it — but our lives are jam-packed with cultural signifiers. This is just one of thousands, one whose importance probably barely cracks America’s top 100 list.

And the reason it doesn’t is that even creationists don’t take their own views seriously. How do I know this? Well, creationists like to fight over whether we should teach evolution in high school, but they never go much beyond that. Nobody wants to remove it from university biology departments. Nobody wants to shut down actual medical research that depends on the workings of evolution. In short, almost nobody wants to fight evolution except at the purely symbolic level of high school curricula, the one place where it barely matters in the first place. The dirty truth is that a 10th grade knowledge of evolution adds only slightly to a 10th grade understanding of biology.

I think this goes too far. For starters, saying evolution adds only slightly to a 10th grade understanding of biology is to say that there is no 10th grade understanding of biology, at all. Evolution is the single most important concept in biology, the idea that changed it from a random collection of facts to a real scientific discipline. Biology without evolution is akin to physics without math, and denying it is akin to denying heliocentrism.

Furthermore, I say a lack of wide understanding of evolution is hurting the country, most obviously in the form of antibiotic resistance. Industrial feedlots grow their animals stewed in powerful antibiotics to shave their operating costs, which is leading to bacteria evolving past them and resistant infections cropping up in humans. It’s a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, which are tough to overcome in any case, but an understanding of evolution makes the situation immediately and alarmingly obvious, while disbelief can cloud the situation. Witness hack “scientists” at Liberty University, who publish work quibbling with the details of the evidence and thereby muddy the conversation. I’m not saying that’s the only factor, but surely if 80 percent of the country had a strong understanding of evolution, it would be easier to horsewhip the FDA into outlawing antibiotic use in non-sick animals.

More fundamentally, science denial in general is growing like gangbusters on the right, most obviously with respect to climate change. All the denier techniques now in common use among people like Jim DeMint—hysterical accusations, the fog of bogus but science-y sounding data, incessant TV appearances of the few deniers with actual credentials, taking things out of context, character assassination, repetition of debunked talking points, etc.—all these were perfected in the trenches of the evolution-creationism wars. It’s no accident that global warming denial found such fertile ground on the right.

Ryan Cooper is a General Assistant at the Washington Monthly, on Twitter at twitter.com/ryanlcooper.

The Fiscal Legacy of George W. Bush | BRUCE BARTLETT The New York Times

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Republicans assert that Barack Obama assumed sole responsibility for the budget on Jan. 20, 2009. From that date, all increases in the debt or deficit are his responsibility and no one else’s, they say.

The Fiscal Legacy of George W. Bush
JUNE 12, 2012, 6:00 AM

By BRUCE BARTLETT

This is, of course, nonsense – and the American people know it. As I documented in a previous post, even today 43 percent of them hold George W. Bush responsible for the current budget deficit versus only 14 percent who blame Mr. Obama.

The American people are right; Mr. Bush is more responsible, as a new report from the Congressional Budget Office documents.

In January 2001, the office projected that the federal government would run a total budget surplus of $3.5 trillion through 2008 if policy was unchanged and the economy continued according to forecast. In fact, there was a deficit of $5.5 trillion.

The projected surplus was primarily the result of two factors. First was a big tax increase in 1993 that every Republican in Congress voted against, saying that it would tank the economy. This belief was wrong. The economy boomed in 1994, growing 4.1 percent that year and strongly throughout the Clinton administration.

The second major contributor to budget surpluses that emerged in 1998 was tough budget controls that were part of the 1990 and 1993 budget deals. The main one was a requirement that spending could not be increased or taxes cut unless offset by spending cuts or tax increases. This was known as Paygo, for pay as you go.

During the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush warned that budget surpluses were dangerous because Congress might spend them, even though Paygo rules prevented this from happening. His Feb. 28, 2001, budget message reiterated this point and asserted that future surpluses were likely to be even larger than projected due principally to anticipated strong revenue growth.

This was the primary justification for a big tax cut. Subsequently, as it became clear that the economy was slowing – a recession began in March 2001 – that became a further justification.

The 2001 tax cut did nothing to stimulate the economy, yet Republicans pushed for additional tax cuts in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2008. The economy continued to languish even as the Treasury hemorrhaged revenue, which fell to 17.5 percent of the gross domestic product in 2008 from 20.6 percent in 2000. Republicans abolished Paygo in 2002, and spending rose to 20.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2008 from 18.2 percent in 2001.

According to the C.B.O., by the end of the Bush administration, legislated tax cuts reduced revenues and increased the national debt by $1.6 trillion. Slower-than-expected growth further reduced revenues by $1.4 trillion.

However, the Bush tax cuts continued through 2010, well into the Obama administration. These reduced revenues by another $369 billion, adding that much to the debt. Legislated tax cuts enacted by President Obama and Democrats in Congress reduced revenues by an additional $407 billion in 2009 and 2010. Slower growth reduced revenues by a further $1.3 trillion. Contrary to Republican assertions, there were no additional revenues from legislated tax increases.

In late 2010, Mr. Obama agreed to extend all the Bush tax cuts for another two years. In 2011, this reduced revenues by $105 billion.

On the spending side, legislated increases during the Bush administration added $2.4 trillion to deficits and the debt through 2008. This includes $121 billion for Medicare Part D, a new entitlement program enacted by Republicans in 2003.

Economic factors added almost nothing to increased spending – just $27 billion in total. This is mainly because interest rates were much lower than C.B.O. had anticipated, leading to lower spending for interest on the debt.

After 2008, it becomes harder to separate spending that was initiated under Mr. Bush from that under Mr. Obama. We do know that spending for Part D has risen rapidly – Republicans phased in the program to disguise its budgetary cost – adding $150 billion to the debt during 2009-11.

According to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan increased the debt by $795 billion through the end of fiscal 2008. The continuation of these wars by Mr. Obama added another $488 billion through the end of 2011.

Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.

Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011.

Republicans would have us believe that somehow we could have avoided the recession and balanced the budget since 2009 if only they had been in charge. This would be a neat trick considering that the recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

They would also have us believe that all of the increase in debt resulted solely from higher spending, nothing from lower revenues caused by tax cuts. And they continually imply that one of the least popular spending increases of recent years, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was an Obama administration program, when in fact it was a Bush administration initiative proposed by the Treasury Department that was signed into law by Mr. Bush on Oct. 3, 2008.

Lastly, Republicans continue to insist that tax cuts are highly stimulative, often saying that they add nothing to the debt, when this is obviously ridiculous.

Conversely, they are adamant that tax increases must not be part of any deficit-reduction package because they never reduce deficits and instead are spent. This is also ridiculous, as the experience of the Clinton administration clearly shows. The new C.B.O. data confirm these facts.

Copyright 2012

Understanding Bitcoin | Al Jazeera Nicolas Mendoza

Bitcoin is at the forefront of 'hacktivism', giving its users a free alternative to contemporary financial mechanisms. Last Modified: 09 Jun 2012 16:14

Bitcoin is an online decentralised economic system bypassing traditional infrastructures of modern finance [zcopley] The above image is licensed under Creative Commons, and can be found here.

Hong Kong - The term hacktivism has been grossly misconstrued by the media. The image of masked saboteurs attacking from the darkness has romantic appeal but this spectacular narrative of sabotage ultimately misinforms, other-ising hackers and distorting hacking itself. Richard Stallman defines hacking as exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness . Real hacktivism, then, is less about denial of service attacks, which are acts of digital protest, than about the clever creation or intervention of software forms for social change. It is less about sabotage than about alternatives.

Hacktivism allows dissent to overcome the limitations of protest, actually implementing alternatives and making them widely available without asking for permission from the status quo. It gives wings to the possibility for gradual peaceful revolution: alternatives no longer need to remain dreams, but can become real options for real people.

Hacktivism often opens real spaces by selling the idea first to the machines, after which people realise other ways are possible and allow themselves to think in new ways. This is what the work of a programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto did for economics. In 2008 he coded a critique of the world's monetary system into a P2P computer protocol he called Bitcoin. Bitcoin started running on January 3, 2009, and is now a working decentralised monetary system with thousands of users around the world.

The Bitcoin protocol is based on a fundamental critique of the world's monetary system: that it demands undeserved amounts of trust from us. Nakamoto thought that it would be better to place trust outside the monetary system itself and back into social life:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

Through a clever use of encryption technology, the Bitcoin protocol enables this move. In networked storage systems, Nakamoto explains, strong encryption technology affords end users peace of mind because they no longer need to trust the system admin with their privacy. He argues that if money could be similarly encrypted, middlemen who provide trust (e.g. banks) could be bypassed:

It's time we had the same thing [strong encryption] for money. With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless. (…)

[Bitcoin] takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle. The result is a distributed system with no single point of failure. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of the P2P network to check for double spending.

The result is Bitcoin. It is not controlled by any state nor owned by any company; neither is it a company in itself. It is merely an open source computer protocol that runs over the internet.

Finite fiat, if I may

Strictly speaking, I would argue, Bitcoin is a fiat currency. The term fiat is Latin for let it be done: it designates systems where an entity (eg the Federal Reserve) summons new money into existence by saying, in a god-like way, let it be done . In the case of Bitcoin new coins are brought into existence across the network by the algorithms in the protocol.

No entity or individuals are entitled to new bitcoins on merits other than their standing among the sum of active nodes in the network in terms of computing power. Of course, anyone can also earn already-existing bitcoins through work, through the exchange of goods and services, or (in the case of social organisations) through the trust the public places on their ability to do good.

In short, bitcoins are created through a transparent and distributed process determined by mathematics. Bitcoin is finite post-Westphalian fiat, a monetary system where currency is indeed created, but through an algorithm driven by the logic of the network of distributed - rather than concentrated - power.

Bitcoin does a better job than central entities (like the Fed) at creating new money because it does so in a decentralised way and without the need to create debt; it does a better job at storage than banks because it does so for free; and it does a better job at transfer than SWIFT because it is faster, cheaper, available to anyone, and not subjected to the control of Western powers: SWIFT's ability to blockade Iranian banking transactions shows the ultimately unilateral nature of global financial channels.

What we have here is radically different from the current system where money creation is based on debt, politically motivated, surrounded by secrecy, inflationary, unilateralist, colonialist, and exploitative of powerless nations, etc. The flaws in the design of modern currency are at the roots of the social and ecological disasters we face today. Alternative currencies in general hold the promise of a way out, and the emergence of a vibrant Bitcoin economy in particular is one of the most interesting developments in recent times.

Money not owed

Bitcoin, I think, is revolutionary especially because it distributes the creation of money. The current system, based on national and personal debt, insidiously concedes obscene yet hard to object power to rich nations and global banks. Debt-based money not only provides exorbitant privileges to powerful nations and threatens collapse in Europe and the US under its own absurdity; it also deforms the nature of human sociality.

The disastrous social consequences of placing debt at the root of the creation of money cannot be understated. A society whose currency is backed by debt (aka the modern world) is a society where freedom is just a word because the reality of everyday life, even for the middle classes of so-called rich countries, tends toward sublimated forms of slavery or debt peonage. An economy built on debt-based currency can only grow , the 2008 economic collapse showed us, by putting more people deeper into debt. Inevitably, this leads to a society where the many always owe more and more to the few, eventually making democracy a farce. Bankers, as Robert Fisk puts it, are the dictators of the West.

The whole world's formal economy is backed by debt, and debt is backed by violence. This can be verified by defaulting, and subsequently resisting eviction: state force will be used sooner rather than later. Anthropologist David Graeber, one of the most prominent scholars in the Occupy Wall Street movement, articulates in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, how debt embeds our culture and our very selves into an inhuman, unsustainable, condition of iniquity:

…by turning human sociality itself into debts, they transform the very foundations of our being since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with others into matters of fault, sin, and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity that can only be overcome by completing some great cosmic transaction that will annihilate everything.

The P2P money creation system that Bitcoin proposes is truly something else as it deflates the dark power of debt-based money in society; it allows envisioning a world where the wheels of debt are no longer at the origin of economic activity. This does not mean that Bitcoin is necessarily the final and perfect answer to our needs, but it is an important step in demonstrating that it can be done.

Ten years

It has already been over three years since the Bitcoin protocol started running, and yet these are still the very early days. What Nakamoto created is really just an open and autonomous backbone for global finance. Several layers of complementary technologies and services will need to be developed around this backbone before Bitcoin can aspire to really become an operational global currency for the 21st century.

Cleverly, he devised a system in a way that planted the incentive to take over this extremely complex task in individuals likely to have intimate knowledge of technology and an understanding of the nature of networked sociality.

The first miners joined the network out of intellectual curiosity when it was nothing more than an experiment posted to an obscure cryptography forum. Bitcoins were easy to mine in the beginning, and as the network grew they gained real value. Suddenly many realised they had run into small fortunes, that they could potentially become larger fortunes if Bitcoin succeeded, and that it was really up to them to make it happen. They understood that their success depends on making Bitcoin useful, safe and easy for the largest possible amount of people.

Bitcoin entrepreneurs have already developed an impressive, if experimental and imperfect, ecology of operational support infrastructures. Available services include exchange, escrow, arbitrage, transfer, storage, consulting, investment, auction, payment, mobile support, etc. A lot of things can already be paid for using Bitcoin. These services are autonomous initiatives, driven by no authority other than that which emanates from the needs of Bitcoin users and the nature of the Bitcoin protocol

On a larger scale, Bitcoin's neutrality also gives it the potential to be a good national reserve currency as well as a low-friction medium for international trade. Governments, especially in poor countries , could start their own Bitcoin mining operations and make Bitcoin an acceptable means of tax payment: a Bitcoin reserves strategy could shield vulnerable economies from global currency cycles and provide increased autonomy from foreign powers.

If Bitcoin is to become a widely used everyday currency, it will not happen overnight. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, believes that it will take Bitcoin about eight more years to reach the level of usability required for wide adoption:

I predict that Bitcoin will reach usability sometime around 2019. I base that prediction on earlier disruption technologies, where blogging started appearing in 1994 and reached mainstream adoption in 2004; file sharing started in 1989 over the net and Napster hit in 1999. You had streaming video 1995, mainly porn sites streaming animated gifs, what was then tip of the spear technology; Youtube was founded 2005 and just swept the floor with everyone else just because they were usable. This is not something bad; it is just an observation that it takes ten years to get a disruptive technology from inception to becoming so easy to use that it reaches mainline adoption.

When it comes to money, people are understandably reluctant towards experimentation. Either it works, meaning it provides clear advantages, or it doesn't. No part of the Bitcoin economy will last unless it is objectively a better deal for the end user than the flawed-but-known ways of today. In this sense Bitcoin is perhaps one of the hacktivist revolution's greatest tests: can the network itself actually handle the globe's finance? Can it really deliver better money for this incredibly complex world? It could very well be that it actually will. It seems to be advancing in that direction, slowly, step by step.

Nicolás Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne and a member of the P2P Foundation. Nicolas Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne. Follow him on Twitter: @nicolasmendo

Romney wrong on tax cuts | Fareed Zakaria OpEd in The Washington Post

Fareed Zakaria

Thursday, Jun 7, 2012 The Obama campaign’s attack ad about Bain Capital presented a simplistic picture of a complicated reality. Private-equity firms can play a crucial role in keeping companies competitive. And although some firms have engaged in some bad practices, on the whole the industry has grown so large because it performs a useful function. But the worst part about the ad was that it had little to do with America’s challenges or Obama’s policies.

By contrast, Mitt Romney’s first major ad is substantive — and wrong. He tells us that on his first day in office — after approving the Keystone XL pipeline — he will “introduce tax cuts . . . that reward job creators not punish them.” The one idea that is almost certain not to jump-start this economy is a tax cut.

Why can we be sure of this? Because that is what we have done for the past three years. For those who think President Obama’s policies have done little to produce growth, keep in mind that the single largest piece of his policies — in dollar terms — has been tax cuts. They actually began before Obama, with the tax cut passed under the George W. Bush administration in response to the financial crisis in 2008. Then came the stimulus bill, of which tax cuts were the largest chunk by far — one-third of the total. The Department of Transportation, by contrast, got 6 percent of the total to fix infrastructure.

That wasn’t the end of it. There was the payroll tax cut, the small business tax cut, the extension of the payroll tax cut, and so on. The president’s Twitter feed boasted: “President Obama has signed 21 tax cuts to support middle class families.” And how has that worked out?

In the wake of a financial crisis caused by excessive debt, tax cuts are highly unlikely to lead to increased economic activity. People use the money to pay down their debts rather than shop for cars, houses and appliances. As for the idea that job creators are not creating jobs because their taxes are too high, think about it: Would Mitt Romney invest more of his money in American factories if only he had paid less than the 13.9 percent rate he paid last year? Please!

The Wall Street Journal invoked Milton Friedman to say that the problem with all of these tax cuts is that they are temporary. If only we had across-the-board cuts in rates. Except that these were tried as well. The 2001 Bush tax cuts were designed precisely along those lines. They were, in dollar terms, the largest tax cuts in U.S. history.

And the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded in 2010 that “by almost any economic indicator, the economy performed better in the period before the [Bush] tax cuts than after the tax cuts were enacted. . . . GDP growth, median real household income growth, weekly hours worked, the employment-population ratio, personal savings, and business investment growth were all lower in the period after the tax cuts were enacted.” The years 2000 to 2007 were the period of the weakest job growth in the United States since the Great Depression.

The one certain effect of tax cuts would be to balloon the deficit. Bruce Bartlett, a former economic official under Ronald Reagan, points out that the aggregate revenue loss of the Bush tax cuts was the largest in U.S. history. “Both Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan passed larger individual tax cuts, but both took back about half of them with subsequent tax increases.”

When pressed, Romney and his advisers sometimes say that they are just for tax reform; other times, they cite the Simpson-Bowles plan. I’ve long argued that reforming the nation’s bloated and corrupt tax code is vital and that Simpson-Bowles is a superb framework for deficit reduction. But neither will cut taxes. Simpson-Bowles raises them by more than a trillion dollars. You can use euphemisms such as “ending tax expenditures” and “closing loopholes,” but when you do that, someone’s taxes will go up. And when you close big loopholes such as the deduction of mortgage interest — which is the only way to get real revenue —tens of millions of peoples’ taxes will go up.

Tax cuts have been a central cause of America’s deficit problems. For four decades, Washington politicians have bought popularity by cutting taxes, always saying that spending cuts or growth will make up for lost revenue. That rarely happened, and the result is $11 trillion in federal debt held by the public. To perpetuate this pandering one more time is not just dishonest — it is dangerous.

comments@fareedzakaria.com

Salt, We Misjudged You | The New York Times

June 2, 2012
By GARY TAUBES Oakland, Calif.

THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping.

While sports nutritionists have since come around to recommend that we should indeed replenish salt when we sweat it out in physical activity, the message that we should avoid salt at all other times remains strong. Salt consumption is said to raise blood pressure, cause hypertension and increase the risk of premature death. This is why the Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines still consider salt Public Enemy No. 1, coming before fats, sugars and alcohol. It’s why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that reducing salt consumption is as critical to long-term health as quitting cigarettes.

And yet, this eat-less-salt argument has been surprisingly controversial — and difficult to defend. Not because the food industry opposes it, but because the actual evidence to support it has always been so weak.

When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.

“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.

WHY have we been told that salt is so deadly? Well, the advice has always sounded reasonable. It has what nutritionists like to call “biological plausibility.” Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.

The scientific question is whether this temporary phenomenon translates to chronic problems: if we eat too much salt for years, does it raise our blood pressure, cause hypertension, then strokes, and then kill us prematurely? It makes sense, but it’s only a hypothesis. The reason scientists do experiments is to find out if hypotheses are true.

In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.

Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 —publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.

While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time. In the United States, for instance, it has remained constant for the last 50 years, despite 40 years of the eat-less-salt message. The average salt intake in these populations — what could be called the normal salt intake — was one and a half teaspoons a day, almost 50 percent above what federal agencies consider a safe upper limit for healthy Americans under 50, and more than double what the policy advises for those who aren’t so young or healthy. This consistency, between populations and over time, suggests that how much salt we eat is determined by physiological demands, not diet choices.

One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives. An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored. Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist and a co-author of the DASH-Sodium trial, said “there is nothing really new.” According to the cardiologist Graham MacGregor, who has been promoting low-salt diets since the 1980s, the studies were no more than “a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation.”

This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Independent Investigator in Health Policy Research and the author of “Why We Get Fat.”

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Levels of key greenhouse gas pass milestone | The Washington Post

When hitting 400 is not good: Levels of key greenhouse gas pass milestone, trouble scientists

By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, May 31, 2:32 PM

WASHINGTON — The world’s air has reached what scientists call a troubling new milestone for carbon dioxide, the main global warming pollutant.

Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn’t quite a surprise, because it’s been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395.

So far, only the Arctic has reached that 400 level, but the rest of the world will follow soon.

“The fact that it’s 400 is significant,” said Jim Butler, global monitoring director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. “It’s just a reminder to everybody that we haven’t fixed this and we’re still in trouble.”

Carbon dioxide is the chief greenhouse gas and most of it lasts about 100 years in the air, but some of it stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Some carbon dioxide is natural, mainly from decomposing dead plants and animals. Before the Industrial Age, levels were around 275 parts per million.

For more than 60 years, readings have been in the 300s, except in urban areas, where levels are skewed. The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal for electricity and oil for gasoline, has caused the overwhelming bulk of the man-made increase in carbon in the air, scientists say.

It’s been at least 800,000 years — probably more — since Earth saw carbon dioxide levels in the 400s, Butler and other climate scientists said.

Until now.

Readings are coming in at 400 and higher all over the Arctic. They’ve been recorded in Alaska, Greenland, Norway, Iceland and even Mongolia. But levels change with the seasons and will drop a bit in the summer, when plants suck up carbon dioxide, NOAA scientists said.

So the yearly average for those northern stations likely will be lower and so will the global number.

Globally, the average carbon dioxide level is about 395 parts per million but will pass the 400 mark within a few years, scientists said.

The Arctic is the leading indicator in global warming, both in carbon dioxide in the air and effects, said Pieter Tans, a senior NOAA scientist.

“This is the first time the entire Arctic is that high,” he said.

Tans called reaching the 400 number “depressing,” and Butler said it was “a troubling milestone.”

“It’s an important threshold,” said Carnegie Institution ecologist Chris Field, a scientist who helps lead the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “It is an indication that we’re in a different world.”

Ronald Prinn, an atmospheric sciences professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said 400 is more a psychological milestone than a scientific one. We think in hundreds, and “we’re poking our heads above 400,” he said.

Tans said the readings show how much the Earth’s atmosphere and its climate are being affected by humans. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels hit a record high of 34.8 billion tons in 2011, up 3.2 percent, the International Energy Agency announced last week.

The agency said it’s becoming unlikely that the world can achieve the European goal of limiting global warming to just 2 degrees based on increasing pollution and greenhouse gas levels.

“The news today, that some stations have measured concentrations above 400 ppm in the atmosphere, is further evidence that the world’s political leaders — with a few honorable exceptions — are failing catastrophically to address the climate crisis,” former Vice President Al Gore, the highest-profile campaigner against global warming, said in an email. “History will not understand or forgive them.”

But political dynamics in the United States mean there’s no possibility of significant restrictions on man-made greenhouse gases no matter what the levels are in the air, said Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute.

“These milestones are always worth noting,” said economist Myron Ebell at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute. “As carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, global temperatures flattened out, contrary to the models” used by climate scientists and the United Nations.

He contends temperatures have not risen since 1998, which was unusually hot.

Temperature records contradict that claim. Both 2005 and 2010 were warmer than 1998, and the entire decade of 2000 to 2009 was the warmest on record, according to NOAA.

___

Online:

NOAA’s global monitoring lab: http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/

___

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
© The Washington Post Company

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Coffee linked to lower risk of death | Los Angeles Times

A study finds that older adults who drink java are less likely to die than those who don't. Subjects who averaged four or five cups per day fared best, though it's not clear why.

By Amina Khan
6:18 PM PDT, May 16, 2012

Researchers have some reassuring news for the legions of coffee drinkers who can't get through the day without a latte, cappuccino, iced mocha, double-shot of espresso or a plain old cuppa joe: That coffee habit may help you live longer.

A new study that tracked the health and coffee consumption of more than 400,000 older adults for nearly 14 years found that java drinkers were less likely to die during the study than their counterparts who eschewed the brew. In fact, men and women who averaged four or five cups of coffee per day had the lowest risk of death, according to a report in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The research doesn't prove that coffee deserves the credit for helping people live longer. But it is the largest analysis to date to suggest that the beverage's reputation for being a liquid vice may be undeserved.

There's been concerns for a long time that coffee might be a risky behavior, said study leader Neal Freedman, an epidemiologist with the National Cancer Institute who drinks coffee here and there. The results offer some reassurance that it's not a risk factor for future disease.

Coffee originated in Ethiopia more than 500 years ago. As it spread through the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, its popularity was tempered by concerns about its supposed ill effects. A 1674 petition by aggrieved women in London complained that coffee left men impotent, with nothing moist but their snotty noses, nothing stiff but their joints, nor standing but their ears, according to the book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

In more modern times, the caffeinated beverage has been seen as a stimulating substance, a commonly consumed drug, said Rob van Dam, an epidemiologist at the National University of Singapore who has investigated the drink's health effects but was not involved in the latest study.

People get somewhat dependent on it, Van Dam said. If you try to rapidly reduce coffee consumption, you get headaches or other symptoms.

The National Coffee Assn. estimates that 64% of American adults drink coffee on a daily basis, with the average drinker consuming 3.2 cups each day. To get a deeper understanding of the risks and benefits of all that joe, the National Cancer Institute researchers turned to data on 402,260 adults who were between the ages of 50 and 71 when they joined the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study in 1995 and 1996. The volunteers were followed through December 2008 or until they died — whichever came first.

When the team first crunched the numbers, coffee seemed to have a detrimental effect on longevity. But people who drink coffee are more likely to smoke, and when the scientists took that into account (along with other demographic factors), the opposite appeared to be true.

Compared with men who didn't drink any coffee at all, those who drank just one cup per day had a 6% lower risk of death during the course of the study; those who drank two to three cups per day had a 10% lower risk, and those who had four to five cups had a 12% lower risk. For men who drank six cups or more, the apparent benefit waned slightly, with a 10% lower risk of death during the study compared with men who drank no coffee.

The relationship between coffee and risk of death was even more dramatic in women. Those who drank one cup per day had 5% lower odds of dying during the study compared with women who drank none. Those who consumed two or three cups a day were 13% less likely to die, those who downed four or five cups were 16% less likely to die, and those who drank six or more cups had a 15% lower mortality rate.

The effect held across a number of causes of death — including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke and diabetes — but not cancer, the researchers found. And the link was stronger in coffee drinkers who had never smoked.

The correlation even held for people who mostly drank decaf brew, the researchers found.

If these are real biological effects, they seem to [have] to do with the substances in coffee that are not caffeine, Van Dam said. Other compounds in the coffee could be linked to the lower death rates, he said — or there could be no causal relationship at all.

And, Van Dam added, the researchers didn't make distinctions between different types of drinks. Unfiltered brews like Turkish coffee or Scandinavian boiled coffee have been shown to raise cholesterol and could present very different results from the current study if examined separately, he said.

To prove that coffee deserves the credit, researchers could study each of the 1,000-odd compounds in the brew and test them on subjects over time to see if they reduced inflammation, improved the body's sensitivity to insulin or caused any other useful biological effects, he said.

amina.khan@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

The 12 Best Reasons Why The U.S. Is Not Now, And Never Should Be, A Christian Nation

May 11, 2012 By Deborah Montesano

Christians today have the same problem as their fellow believers of two hundred years ago: “One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.” –The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968.

The ‘Christian’ label did not even fit some of our early Presidents. However, whether religious or not, the great intellects of democracy had a vision of all that the United States could be. They wouldn’t have dreamed of imposing religion on their fellow Americans; they knew that this nation’s greatness came from not being a Christian one. In their own emphatic words:

1) “Enforced uniformity confounds civil and religious liberty and denies the principles of Christianity and civility. No man shall be required to worship or maintain a worship against his will.” Roger Williams, Puritan minister and founder of Rhode Island, in The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution, 1644.

2) “As the government of the United States of America is not on any sense founded on the Christian Religion, – as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims), – and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” –Treaty of Tripoli

–initiated under President George Washington, 1796

–signed into law by President John Adams, 1797

–ratified unanimously by the Senate, 1797

–Published in full in all 13 states, with no record of complaint or dissent.

3) “But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.”–John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816

4) “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship… I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT

5) “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.”–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Miller, 1808 [note that this does not say Christian religion; it refers to all religions, equally]

6) “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.” –Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

7) “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” –James Madison, letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774

8) “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?” –James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, addressed to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of VA, 1795

9) “What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people… A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not.” –James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785 .

10) “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” –James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance

11) “He had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term– he had faith in laws, principles, causes and effects.” –Supreme Court Justice David Davis, on Abraham Lincoln

12) “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” –First Amendment, Constitution of the United States