Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

In Brief - January 19th, 2008

(Moved up to the top - Andrew)

Perhaps because the Washington State Legislature is now in session, this week's local news skewed heavily towards energy, environmental, and educational issues.

These are all important topics. Without energy, society collapses. Without an environment, we have nowhere to live. And without education, we may as well just turn back the calendar a thousand years and start over.

In the Pacific Northwest

First, a few notes about the legislative session, which kicked off this Monday:

Recognizing that you can't fix or even understand a problem until you've measured it, Governor Gregoire is proposing greenhouse gas emissions monitoring and tracking across Washington, laying the groundwork for future mitigation efforts. Considering that history is littered with government programs that failed because they never had a way to know whether they were succeeding, all we can say is good job, Governor!

Paper or plastic? Lawmakers are considering a measure that would require grocery stores to use more recyclable bags:
Gilliam said that all the grocery stores he represents sell reusable bags for about $1, and they also offer paper. But he said that for some customers, plastic is more convenient.
That quote just about sums up the whole world's environmental problems: individual people choose temporary personal convenience over the greater, long-term good. It's the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.

This is a really great move: making it easier for schools to use produce from local farms in their school lunch programs.

We strongly support this idea because it touches on so many important topics: childrens' wellness, a sustainable environment (consider the amount of fossil fuel it takes to truck food from afar to our schools), and helping Washingtonian growers keep their family farms, to name three.

And now, briefly...
  • This was mentioned in Monday's In Brief, but as participatory democracy only works if people know where and when to participate, I'll repeat it. Washington's caucuses will be held on February 9th. Democratic Party caucus locations can be found at this page; Republican caucus locations at this one. Yes, that's right, I linked to the King County GOP site. Hey, we're progressives, we want everybody to participate.
  • Just before leaving office in 2001, President Clinton designated several million acres of Forest Service land as protected roadless wilderness. The Forest Service is now seeking to revoke that protection on some 609,000 acres, mostly in southern Idaho. Idaho Lt. Governor Jim Risch testified during hearings on the proposal held on Monday. Proponents argue that this is a pro-active proposal, aimed at reducing the severity of future wildfire damage by making it easier for firefighters to access remote areas. Opponents argue that this is more about logging in protected areas than anything else. Monday's hearings kicked off a 90 day public comment period on the proposal; if you have an opinion on the Idaho Roadless Draft Rule, you can sound off at this Forest Service web page.
  • The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a report on what to do if FEMA denies (or underpays) your flood damage claims. With La Nina conditions expected to continue through the springtime with heavier than normal rainfall in Northwest, it may literally pay to be informed.
  • Gee, how about that: make it possible for people to measure their energy conservation, and whadda ya know, they conserve energy! Puget Sound Energy, are you listening? I signed up for your green power program the minute you announced it. When are you going to offer smart-metering technology like this too?
  • Oregon is wrestling with legal nuances of tuition-supported all day kindergarden classes. The real question is, why are we dumping billions upon billions into foreign wars when our schools can't afford all-day classes
  • Meanwhile in Washington, the Seattle Public School Board has voted to close the John Marshall alternative school. The school serves some of Seattle's most at-risk children: teen mothers, kids who have been expelled from other schools, or kids who have just gotten out of jail. The school board blames Principal Joe Drake for ineffective leadership. The school district is planning alternative programs for the displaced John Marshall students.
Finally: Bill Gates has announced he put $30 million into issue advertising for education in '08. I have to say that I find this news item particularly gratifying, not only because I focus on education policy at NPI, but because it's nice to see someone with serious money and public stature getting behind an issue I deeply care about. I see the near-abysmal state of our educational system as one of the root causes behind much of what's broken in America today.

Study after study has shown education to be the gateway to success in life. Children who get a good education can build good lives for themselves.

Children who don't get that education have great difficulty building anything better than a minimum wage existence. Personally, I want more for my kids than that, and I'm delighted to see Bill Gates step up to help. Can't wait to see the ads!

Across the Nation
  • First, let me save you a lot of time by not linking to a zillion presidential primary news items. You can get that stuff anywhere.
  • Remember the Crandall Canyon mining disaster last summer? The one in Utah that killed six miners? The one where three more perished in subsequent rescue attempts? DailyKos contributor Devilstower has an excellent writeup of the factors leading to that disaster, painting what I have to admit is a very compelling case for culpability on the part of the mine owner.
  • Reclusive world chess champion and Cold War symbol Bobby Fisher has died.
Lastly, the National Academy of Science has released a book aimed at giving the public a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the current scientific evidence for evolution, to support evolutionary theory's place in the classroom.

I recall learning, in one of the first science classrooms I ever attended back in grade school, the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. In short, a hypothesis is more or less "any random idea about how the universe functions" while a theory is "an idea about how the universe works, which is supported by so much hard evidence that we'll all be damned surprised if it turns out to be wrong."

In my opinion, one of the sneakiest tactics the "Intelligent Design" crowd has used to muddle the Evolution-vs-ID debate is to mis-label their brand of hookup with the word "theory." And it's a glaring failure of the mass media that has covered this made-to-order controversy that reporters have universally failed to correct the terminology in their reporting.

Around the World
  • Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to summit Mount Everest, has died at age 88.
  • Turkish forces strike 60 Kurdish positions in northern Iraq. Southern Turkey contains a whole lot of Kurds, many of them native to that region, many of them refugees from Iraq. Iraq's Kurds live in northern Iraq, just on the other side of the Iraq/Turkey border. Ever since the fall of Sadaam Hussein, Turkey has been worried that Iraqi Kurds would get together with Turkey's PKK (a Kurdish separatist group) to demand a state of their own, carving a chunk out of both parent nations. Turkey has been adamant about not accepting such an outcome, and today seems willing to back that up with air strikes against PKK positions.
  • Tata Motors has unveiled world's cheapest production car. Aimed at the exploding Indian economy, the $2500 vehicle aims to be an affordable alternative for families who, heretofore, have been packing three or four people onto motorized scooters. British newspaper The Independent wonders, rightly so, whether the global environment can afford for India to go automotive in a big way. If only someone had been asking that question about us, 100 years ago.
  • Human-kind is resuming exploration of the planet Mercury, ending a 35 year hiatus with a brief flyby of the spacecraft. The spacecraft Messenger snapped scads of new photos, many of which will reveal previously unseen portions of Mercury's surface, that will be radioed back to Earth over the next several days. It will make two more flybys of Mercury, gravitational assist maneuvers designed to enable the spacecraft to enter a long-duration orbit of Mercury in 2011. Not to be outdone, European and Japanese space agencies ESA and JAXA are teaming up for a 2013 launch of a double orbiter mission to the solar system's speediest little planet.
This Day in History
  • 1862: The Confederacy suffered their first major loss of the Civil War at the Battle of Mill Springs.
  • 1917: Arthur Zimmerman sent the Zimmerman Telegram, proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico against the United States. The message was intercepted by the British and almost immediately deciphered, giving them a key lever to use in drawing the United States into the conflict in World War I. The back-story around the telegram's interception and decryption illustrates a classic problem in signals intelligence: how to use the information you've obtained without revealing how you obtained it.
The Lighter Side
  • PC World has a presentation on the ten worst keyboards of all time. As someone with a history of keyboard-induced repetitive stress problems, and personal experience with five of the keyboards on this list (although thankfully not the several worst-of-the-worst), I have to admit that this article is a rather mixed-emotion stroll down memory lane.
  • Take a look at this Star Wars guide to the candidates. Ok, one presidential primary item. I can't resist. While comparing real presidential candidates with characters from popular science fiction movies is certainly not an advisable method for deciding how to case your vote, it is nevetheless fun.
If you have something to add, please leave a comment.

Comments:

Blogger Rand said...

Maybe the most important bill in the Washington legislature not receiving any attention at all is HB 2150. This bill is intended to thwart the massive efforts by special interests to influence general elections and pack the state supreme court with reactionaries. They of course are fighting the bill tooth and nail. So far they have been more successful in Washington than any other state in preserving a system that can be manipulated by special interests.

January 23, 2008 2:54 PM  

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