Crumbling Infrastructure-Satellite Edition

From All Things Considered yesterday:

Then, Lubchenco used the occasion to point to the importance of NOAA's satellite program.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: Satellites are a must-have when it comes to being prepared in detecting and tracking dangerous tropical weather. Not having satellites and not applying their latest capabilities could spell disaster.
HAMILTON: And she said there's a very real possibility that could happen.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: The future funding for our satellite program is very much in limbo right now.
HAMILTON: Already, Lubchenco said, the agency has been forced to delay the launch of a critical satellite. It would have traveled in a polar orbit, beaming down information for weather and climate forecasts. As a result, when the current satellite doing that job stops working, there will be no replacement.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: We are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do severe storm warnings and long-term weather forecasts that people have come to expect today.
HAMILTON: And Lubchenco says satellites aren't just for hurricanes.
Ms. LUBCHENCO: For example, our ability to do a five-day heads-up about the severe tornadoes that hit a couple of weeks ago was a direct consequence of our having polar orbiting satellites.
HAMILTON: Lubchenco's comments come after years of warnings by groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, that the U.S. needed to replace many aging satellites used to study and monitor the Earth.

The Republican attempts to slash non-defense, non-entitlement spending, combined with constant tax cuts, leads to valuable basic science funding being slashed.  These programs don't have a strong constituency, but they have large real-life effects, and are extremely cheap based on their usefulness.  This nation will suffer for many years because of the 30 years of malinvestment under generally Republican guidance.

Land Ordinance of 1785

Today marks a significant date in U.S.and in surveying history:

The Land Ordinance of 1785 was adopted by the United States Congress on May 20, 1785. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress did not have the power to raise revenue by direct taxation of the inhabitants of the United States. Therefore, the immediate goal of the ordinance was to raise money through the sale of land in the largely unmapped territory west of the original states acquired at the 1783 (Treaty of Paris) after the end of the Revolutionary War. Over three-fourths of the area of the continental United States ultimately came under the rectangular survey. This was important because it provided easily recognized land descriptions, which in turn contributed enormously to the orderly and largely peaceful occupation of the land. The rectangular survey also provided the units within which economic, political, and social development took place.
The Ordinance of 1784 was a resolution written by Thomas Jefferson (delegate from Virginia) calling for Congress to take action. The land west of the Appalachian Mountains, north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River was to be divided into ten separate states. However, the 1784 resolution did not define the mechanism by which the land would become states, or how the territories would be governed or settled before they became states. The Ordinance of 1785 put the 1784 resolution in operation by providing a mechanism for selling and settling the land, while the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 addressed political needs.
The 1785 ordinance laid the foundations of land policy until passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The Land Ordinance established the basis for the Public Land Survey System. The initial surveying was performed by Thomas Hutchins. After he died in 1789, responsibility for surveying was transferred to the Surveyor General. Land was to be systematically surveyed into square townships, six miles (9.656 km) on a side. Each of these townships were sub-divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile (2.59 km²) or 640 acres. These sections could then be further subdivided for re-sale by settlers and land speculators.
The ordinance was also significant for establishing a mechanism for funding public education. Section 16 in each township was reserved for the maintenance of public schools. Many schools today are still located in section sixteen of their respective townships, although a great many of the school sections were sold to raise money for public education. In later States, section 36 of each township was also designated as a "school section".
Knepper notes: “Sections number 8, 11, 26, and 29 in every township were reserved for future sale by the federal government when, it was hoped, they would bring higher prices because of developed land around them. Congress also reserved one third part of all gold, silver, lead, and copper mines to its own use, a bit of wishful thinking as regards Ohio lands.” The ordinance also said “That three townships adjacent to Lake Erie be reserved, to be hereafter disposed of by Congress, for the use of the officers, men, and others, refugees from Canada, and the refugees from Nova Scotia, who are or may be entitled to grants of land under resolutions of Congress now existing.“ This was not possible, as the area next to Lake Erie was property of Connecticut, so the Canadians had to wait until the establishment of the Refugee Tract in 1798.
The Point of Beginning for the 1785 survey was where Ohio (as the easternmost part of the Northwest Territory), Pennsylvania and Virginia (now West Virginia) met, on the north shore of the Ohio River near East Liverpool, Ohio. There is a historical marker just north of the site, at the state line where Ohio State Route 39 becomes Pennsylvania Route 68.

Thanks to this Act, plane passengers can look down at the nearly perfect one mile squares which cover the nation's landscape.  It set up the 6 mile by 6 mile survey township. It also gave us the Section, Township, Range system of identifying every parcel of property in the Public Land Survey System.  It also greatly simplified the complex and nearly indefinable system of metes and bounds descriptions, which allowed surveyors to separate out the best land for themselves and their favored clients.  Later, the Act of May 18, 1796 altered the numbering system for sections in townships, and only two surveys in Ohio were conducted under the numbering system of 1785:

The Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785, allowed for the subdivision of government lands, and the subsequent sale of those lands which brought about the largest number of freeholders of property in the history of the world.  It is one of the greatest legacies of the United States.

Centroid of Population in Plato, MO

NOAA:

If you filled out the 2010 Census form from the U.S. Census Bureau, then you had a part in defining the centroid — the point where the center of the U.S. population falls. Every 10 years, after the Census Bureau crunches the numbers and figures out where the centroid is, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) places a geodetic survey disk (also called a survey marker, monument, or bench mark) in the incorporated community closest to its exact geographic location.
NOAA Chief Geodetic Surveyor Dave Doyle, who has helped place a survey marker at the centroid every 10 years since 1980, says first to think of a rectangular-shaped state like Colorado. “If you imagine Colorado as a perfectly flat plain without all the mountains and valleys, and you put it on a map, the place where this rectangular shape balances perfectly on a point is the centroid.”
“Then, think of the United States, including Alaska and the territories, as a flat plain and put it on a map. Imagine also that every individual in the population weighs exactly the same,” he continues. “The centroid is where the center of the population is located.”
The process that the Census Bureau uses to figure out the centroid for the U.S. population is more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.

Company Remining Iron Ore Tailings Moves Ahead

A couple of years ago, I saw this article about a company processing the waste tailings piles in the Minnesota Iron Range to capture more iron ore:

Gazing across the craggy canyon that is the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine in Minnesota's legendary Iron Range, it's hard to believe that our planet's most abundant element - iron - is mostly locked away in the earth's core. For here iron-bearing rock has shouldered its way to the surface in heroic quantities, and men and machines have carved out the world's largest iron-ore pit. And as it has for over a century, Range iron still forges the steel sinews of the American economy. But more than a century of mining has left Iron Country scraped and scarred, a landscape dominated by vast quarries and basins of stony waste from processed ore - tailings, which sprawl across the land like a mighty river delta. Now largely covered by scrub vegetation, these tailings are the remains of a struggle to wrest a living from the earth that began with the great Iron Rush of the 1880s. Fortune hunters from far afield flocked to the rich hematite mines of the Vermilion and Mesabi ranges, which were soon minting millionaires so fast that by 1910 regional capital Duluth was reckoned to have more than any other city in the world.
Two world wars brought boom times as the Range answered the call for iron and steel to arm the nation. And there were busts too, notably during the Depression, when output crashed from 47 million metric tons in 1929 to just 2 million metric tons in 1932. And all the time those tailings kept accumulating - a buildup that will continue until the ore runs out. Then the Range will fall silent, closing a long chapter of American history.
Or maybe not. Just west along Route 169 from the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine, near the town of Keewatin (pop. 1,164), a vast domed structure dominates a tailings basin left by the defunct Mesabi Chief mine. The dome can't be seen from the highway, and few Rangers (and even fewer mining corporations) know it's there. Inside sits equipment that could prove to be as significant to the region as the 1950s-era discovery of a way to extract iron from low-grade taconite rock. The earlier technique arrived in the nick of time for the Range, for its hematite - known locally as "natural" ore - was almost depleted. Similarly, the dome at Keewatin is home to a revolutionary process, dubbed "magnetation," that can extract valuable iron from the tailings - just when the Range is in need of new sources of ore.

I was curious what happened to them, since I hadn't heard anything since.  So after a search, I came across this:

According to Magnetation, the patent-pending Rev 3™ Separator technology allows mining operators to recover a marketable, high-grade iron ore concentrate from low-grade hematite iron deposits, including material left behind from prior mining and mineral processing operations.
The recovered product can be sold to a variety of iron-making industry customers.
As part of the agreement, Cargill has the exclusive, worldwide right to jointly develop and apply the technology with Magnetation, and the right to market the recovered iron concentrate to its international iron ore customers.
Cargill’s financial involvement will help enable Magnetation to boost its production of recovered iron in Minnesota from 150,000 to 450,000 tons per year.
Magnetation points to the promising commercial aspects of the technology internationally, as well as to the environmental benefits in transforming iron tailings basins into functioning ecological wetlands.
“This pioneering technology generates, in essence, a new source for high-grade iron concentrate from existing resources,” said Larry Lehtinen, Magnetation chief executive officer. “Cargill’s support of this iron recovery technology demonstrates the real commercial value it presents to the iron industry worldwide, as well as the promise it holds in terms of its positive environmental footprint.”
“We are pleased to contribute to the advancement of what we see as next-generation technology in iron recovery,” said Bob Mann, vice president of Cargill Ferrous International. “This agreement capitalizes on Magnetation’s iron recovery expertise and Cargill’s international commodity merchandising and asset development capabilities.”

 So apparently, things are going forward with that technology.  That there appears to be one of those billion dollar ideas.

Waiting Out the Flood in the Bar

The New York Times features the denizens of Strick's, a bar where the last residents of Eagle Lake, Mississippi wait out the flood:

Every night they sit in this mostly empty bar, throwing back some beers and eating a communal dinner of hamburgers or crawfish or whatever was brought in by the last person to visit a grocery store.  They tell stories, watch television and talk about any number of things, but usually about the latest measurements of the river, the state of the levees on which they depend for survival and their disappointment in the less hardy souls who took off at the first hint of danger.

“A bunch of people are real sorry they left,” said Tim Stennett, 52, a building contractor who took over the bar when Strick himself — Mike Strickland, formally — handed off the keys.
Mr. Stennett’s wife, Sheryl, became the bartender, though the Stennetts leave the keys with anyone who wants to drink late. Drinks are paid for on the honor system. In keeping with the handwritten admonitions posted throughout the bar, overnight tabs are frowned upon.
The Eagle Lake community, which sits between an expanse of cornfields and picturesque Eagle Lake itself, is a popular spot for fish camps and weekend homes. But most of the residents live here full time, making the 35-mile commute into Vicksburg for work.

If you have to wait out the flood, this seems like a good way to do it.  I'd guess if I were in the town, the chances are better than 50-50 that I'd be hanging out there.

Atchafalaya

James Fallows notes:

The New Yorker has brought out from its paywall archives John McPhee's wonderful 1987 piece "Atchafalaya." This is about the very stretch of the lower Mississippi River in the news today because of the pending decision to open the Morganza Spillway and flood parts of Cajun Country, so as to spare Baton Rouge and New Orleans from being flooded instead.

McPhee's piece, in addition to its narrative and descriptive power, explains the basic forces of nature against which the US Army Corps of Engineers, and much of modern development, have worked. For instance:

>>The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand--frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions.<<

Update: Halfway through the article, it is all geology, hydrology and hydraulics, in other words, awesome.  I was wrong previously today, the Morganza Spillway is downstream from the Old River Control, where the Army Corps fights to keep the Atchafalaya from taking the water of the Mississippi.

More on the Morganza Spillway

The Morganza Spillway, shown while open during the 1973 flood. 

From Wikipedia:

The Morganza Spillway is a flood-control structure in Louisiana along the western bank of the Mississippi River at river mile 280, about three miles northeast of Morganza in Pointe Coupee Parish. The spillway stands between the Mississippi and the Morganza Floodway, which leads to the Atchafalaya Basin and the Atchafalaya River in south-central Louisiana. Its purpose is to divert water from the Mississippi River during major flood events by flooding the Atchafalaya Basin, including the Atchafalaya River and the Atchafalaya Swamp. The spillway and adjacent levees also help prevent the Mississippi from changing its present course through the major port cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, to a new course directly down the Atchafalaya to the Gulf of Mexico. The Morganza Spillway is operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Its gates have been opened only twice, during major Mississippi River floods in 1973 and 2011.

I think it is very important to note the part about how the Morganza Spillway prevents the Mississippi River from changing course, running through the Atchafalaya Basin and leaving New Orleans and Baton Rouge on a back channel.  Also, as is noted at Wikipedia, all of the levees and structures used to relieve levees along the river were put in place after the 1927 flood:

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States,^[6] in large part due to the Mississippi River swelling to 80 miles wide in spots.^[7] To provide protection against river flood and prevent a repeat of the Great Flood of 1927, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1928 to authorize the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build the Bonnet Carre Spillway (located 33 miles above New Orleans and completed in 1931^[8]), the Birds Point floodway in Missouri, and the the Morganza Floodway as part of the 1928 Mississippi River and Tributaries Project.^[7] The Morganza control structure portion of the project was completed in 1954^[7] and subsequently became incorporated into the Mississippi River Commission's 1956 Project Design Flood,^[9] which added the Old River Control Structure in 1963 to the protections used to prevent Mississippi River flood.^[10] The Flood Control Act of 1965 provided further regulation over the Morganza Spillway's role in Mississippi River flood prevention. A concrete pit called a stilling basin was added at the Morganza Spillway in 1977 "to provide erosion protection after the velocity of water pouring through the open bays during a 1973 flood caused severe scouring, or gouging out, of the land behind the bays."^[11]

The blowing of the Birds Point levee, while dramatic, has been part of established plan since 1928.  The landowners in the area, while obviously dejected, knew that this is a possibility every year.  As for the Atchafalaya, it is very interesting that without the Corps, the Mississippi River would shift and flow through that basin.

Faith, Education and Income

Interesting post from David Leonhardt:

The chart in the magazine looks at the percentage of people with a four-year college degree and the percentage of people with family income of at least $75,000 a year, using data from Pew. Here are the percentages if the education cutoff is changed to at least some college (including a two-year degree) and the family income cutoff is changed to $50,000:

	%, at least some college	%, family income $50k+
Hindus	84	80
Reform Jews	83	81
Unitarians	81	55
Conservative Jews	79	74
Anglicans/Episcopalians	76	63
Buddhists	74	56
Orthodox Christians	68	57
Presbyterians	64	60
Secular	60	55
Mormons	60	54
Methodists	56	53
Lutherans	53	54
TOTAL U.S.	50	48
Catholics	47	49
Muslims	47	41
Baptists	40	36
Unaffiliated religious	39	37
Pentecostals	33	29
Jehovah’s Witnesses	31	35

Here are the percentages of people with a post-graduate degree and with family income of at least $100,000 a year:

	%, post-grad degree	%, family income, $100k+
Hindus	43	48
Reform Jews	55	35
Conservative Jews	43	35
Unitarians	26	29
Buddhists	22	26
Anglicans/Episcopalians	35	25
Orthodox Christians	28	18
Presbyterians	26	18
Secular	23	16
Methodists	20	13
TOTAL U.S.	18	11
Mormons	16	10
Catholics	19	10
Muslims	16	10
Lutherans	16	9
Baptists	11	6
Unaffiliated religious	12	6
Pentecostals	7	3
Jehovah’s Witnesses	9	3

In every case, the correlation between education and income is extremely strong.

NASA Photo of the Day

Here:

Flooding From Mississippi River Levee Breach

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers detonated explosives at the Birds Point levee near Wyatt, Missouri, at 10:02 p.m. on May 2, 2011. Water from the intentional breach flooded a 130,000-acre stretch of land. Two more breaches were detonated on May 3 and 5. This image from the Advanced Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft shows the resultant flooding of farmland west of the Mississippi 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the levee breach. On the image, vegetation is displayed in red, bare fields in gray and water in blue. The image covers an area of 30.7 by 39 miles (49.5 by 63 kilometers), and is located near 36.5 degrees north latitude, 89.4 degrees west longitude.

A Season Before War

From the SI archive, Steve Rushin remembers baseball in 1941, the season before major league ballplayers joined the war effort:

In 1941, Joe DiMaggio traveled across the country by coal-fired locomotives and signed autographs with a fountain pen and stuck his arm out the window of his automobile (even in the dead of winter) before hanging a left, because his was an age before turbojet engines and ballpoints and turn signals. He played baseball in flannel pajamas, in stifling heat, and was cooled in clubhouses by an oscillating fan or a bottle of Ballantine's, kept cold in an icebox that was literally that—a block of ice in a wooden box. Co-incidentally, on the night 60 years ago that DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak ended in Cleveland, fans presented Indians manager Roger Peckinpaugh with a marvelous modern convenience: It was described, in the next day's New York Times, as an "electric refrigerator."
Ted Williams hit .406 in '41 without benefit of Palm Pilot, PlayStation or Nokia 8260. Nor did he enjoy homogenized milk, fluoridated water, central air, credit cards, fast food, TV or peace of mind. Consider: On May 15 of that year, when DiMaggio's streak began, Vichy France announced its collaboration with Nazi Germany. On July 17, the day the streak ended, the Nazis' second assault on Russia climaxed with nine million men engaged in fighting on that front. ARMY SELECTEE STARTS DRAFT OF 21-YEAR-OLDS, announced Page One of that day's edition of the Times. The Streak, meanwhile, was eulogized in Sports with but a single story.
All of which is to say—without going too Tom Brokaw on you—that '41 witnessed our greatest generation of ballplayers. True, baseball was not yet integrated, but DiMaggio and Williams alone engineered twin towers of achievement that no player has since scaled. They did so before expansion, chartered flights or steroids, when neither the ball nor the batters were juiced. In essence, these men were slapping matzoh balls off the centerfield wall with arms they developed the old-fashioned way: by signaling turns, in the dead of winter, out the window of a '39 Packard.

In this age of the all-volunteer army, it is hard for me to imagine a time when major league athletes, let alone everyday middle-class citizens, were drafted into the armed forces.  I carry around a 1943 steel penny to remind myself of a time when fighting a war meant that the general public made sacrifices.  I guess that is a time long-gone.

The Amazing Growing Lake

Devils Lake in North Dakota, a glacial depression which is slowly filling up with water:

The lake itself is not shocking. In fact, to eyes like mine, seeing it for the first time, it looks unremarkable, benign even—flat, blue, shallow around the edges. What's unnerving are the signs that the land beneath was dry not long ago. Every few miles along the highway, a cross-street leads straight into the blue, the yellow center lines almost beckoning drivers to follow and submerge. In the town of Minnewaukan, just past D Avenue, Main Street itself disappears into the water.

Around the corner, the playground in front of the local school awaits the water without defense. The football field across the street is already gone, transformed into a wetland with little mounds of grass where marsh birds nest. A wire cage still stands where the baseball diamond was, but on a Saturday afternoon in April, the only people near it are a man and a woman in rubber boots—fishing......

The problem is that it has not stopped. Unlike with a river flood, this water does not naturally recede after a week or a month. It has nowhere to go: The lakebed is the result of a glacier that melted roughly 10,000 years ago, and its only natural outlet is at 1,458 feet above sea level. Since August 1992, the lake has risen more than 29 feet. That would be a remarkable increase in nearly any body of water, but in the context of North Dakota's famously flat topography it is extraordinary; here, the rising lake spreads across the land like water spilled on a table. At the lake's current size, a one-foot rise consumes more than 15,000 acres of surrounding land. In 19 years it has grown from roughly 69 square miles to 285, an area about the size of Fort Worth, Texas.

In recent years the lake has become so massive that it has begun a sort of self-perpetuation through its influence on the local weather. The body of water adds so much moisture to the lower atmosphere that it may well be increasing the amount of precipitation the area receives. And on summer nights in Minnewaukan you hardly need the A/C anymore. Nice for sleeping, perhaps, but the cooler air means less evaporation, more standing lake.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today: Capitalists Who Make vs. Capitalists Who Take, by Dylan Ratigan:

Looking today at our economy, it’s difficult to see who is creating that higher level of value.   Companies pump up their near-term income by accounting tricks, pump up stock prices for shareholders, without creating real value, all of which has had a hugely negative effect on our global economy.
Umair Haque, is at the forefront of pushing for a new way of looking at what, and how, we grow our economy.  He says:

We have a problem — you know, what is this crisis really about? Is it a debt crisis? Is it a liquidity crisis? I think it’s deeper. It’s a crisis of real value creation and we seemed to kind of have hit the limits of our ability to create real value. And for me, real value is what I call “thick value.” And that’s a little bit analogous to what Michael Porter has recently called “shared value.” For me there are three pillars of real value. It has to be sustainable. It can’t go up in a puff of smoke next year like it happened with the banking crisis. It has to be meaningful, that is, it has to reflect real tangible benefits to people on the other side of the transaction of the relationship. And I think that it has to be authentic.

It’s easier to make money in the short-term through exploitation and the extraction and much more labor intensive with a higher failure rate and a much greater degree of challenge to actually advance and create something that is new and different and differentiates in its creation of value.  “So to me, this is a crisis that is about failing to create real value, but it is a crisis of our institutions.  And it’s a crisis that is of things like GDP and corporate profits, and the ways in which we measure and conceive of income.  And so to really get to grips with this crisis, I think we have to begin by taking a cold hard look at those things,” says Umair.

This is an extremely important distinction which should be made.  Much of the growth in GDP in the finance sector is just extracting rents from others.  That is not productive.  When people trumpet private sector activity over government spending, you must ask what value is gained.  Private profit which doesn't increase value doesn't gain society anything.  Infrastructure investment isn't being maintained, and further privatization won't improve that in most cases.  We need to refigure such issues.

Morganza Spillway to be Opened

Probably today:

Rains in the Midwest have swollen the Mississippi River, and National Weather Service officials are predicting crests not seen since the Great Flood of 1927. Opening up Morganza would take pressure off river levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but could send 5 to 25 feet of floodwater down steam to seven parishes, with some of the deepest waters near St. Francisville, west Terrebonne and Morgan City, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Terrebonne Sheriff Vernon Bourgeois said the corps told him as many as 17,000 structures and 4,500 people in Terrebonne could be in the path of floodwaters. Lafourche officials did not return phone calls Monday evening inquiring if they had similar numbers.

“We’re facing yet another historic challenge,” Jindal said Monday in a meeting with local officials at the Port of Morgan City. “Someone asked me, ‘How many once-in-a-lifetime events can we face?’ I’ve given up counting. But I know the people of Louisiana are resilient and we’re going to get through this.”

Col. Ed Fleming, commander of the New Orleans District of the Corps, asked the Mississippi River Commission for permission to open the Morganza spillway structure over the weekend. The Bonnet Carre spillway was opened Monday and will remain open for at least two weeks

Mississippi Flooding in Pictures

35 photos at The Atlantic:

Floodwater engulfs a farm after the Army Corps of Engineers blew a massive hole in a levee at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to divert water from the town of Cairo, Illinois, on May 3, 2011 near Wyatt, Missouri. The diversion flooded about 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland and 100 homes in the state. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) #

Being Catholic and Republican

Daniel Larison looks at Rick Santorum and analyzes the intersection of religious and partisan beliefs:

At the Republican presidential debate on Thursday Rick Santorum was asked about Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s suggestion that there be a social truce. Santorum answered, “Anybody that would suggest we call a truce on moral issues doesn’t understand what America is all about.”
That is wrong. In fact, it’s the precise opposite of what America is about. ~Jennifer Rubin

They’re both wrong in different ways. America is not “about” anything in the way that these two mean it. America isn’t a creedal or proposition nation, and it isn’t an idea or an ideological project. Genuine constitutional conservatism is worthwhile, and it involves more than Berkowitz’s warmed-over fusionism, but it isn’t reducible to individual liberty or limited government, and one cannot claim that America is “about” either of these things. Despite their wishes to the contrary, Christian and especially Catholic conservatives cannot correctly attach moral or religious significance to the founding principles of a Whiggish republic.
What I will say in Santorum’s defense is that he has made this mistake because he considers moral issues, especially those that concern the protection of life and family stability, to be vitally important to a healthy and flourishing culture. At times, Santorum seems to want to argue that eternal verities and pre-political loyalties should take priority in how we organize our society and our polity, and he is probably one of the few Republicans to have held federal office recently to understand that obligations to a community and the common good are not the same as accepting the encroachment of the state. Then he often veers off on some strange militaristic tangent or, as he did the other night, endorses the use of torture on detainees, because he has already made the earlier mistake of attaching too much significance to the nation-state. That in turn leads him to support measures that directly contradict the moral principles that he normally defends. Santorum’s views are the unfortunate mish-mash that results from combining Catholic social teaching with Americanism and militarism, as the latter two tend to overshadow anything interesting that Santorum might have to say from his understanding of the former.

There are a lot of significant points which can be made about this subject.  Daniel pursues how pro-life voters became enmeshed in a bargain with the international interventionalist in support of wars which run counter to their moral values, and how the culture war is a way for the war hawks to co-opt the social conservatives to their war views. 

I think it is interesting to look at how Democratic and Republican Catholics cater their views about which social teachings by the Church are important to follow based on their party's interests.  Democratic Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage,labor unions, the legality of abortion and welfare programs, while being opposed to the death penalty and the war in Iraq.  Republican Catholics often want bans on gay marriage and abortion, destruction of unions, an end to welfare programs and support both the death penalty and the war in Iraq.  It seems like political platforms trump Church teaching nearly every time.  Not exactly a good trend for the stability of the Catholic Church in America.  I would guess that is a contributing factor to making "Former Catholic" the second largest "religious group" in the United States.

Update:  I neglected to mention torture.  Santorum explicitly supported the use of torture on detainees during last week's debate.  Daniel mentioned it, and I hate to leave it off the list of positions against Catholic teaching which Republicans have embraced.

The Tea Party and Liberals Each Misrepresent the Founding Fathers

William Hogeland looks at the economic roots of the American Revolution and how various factions have appropriated what they want to support their causes, even if it is incorrect (h/t Yves Smith):

Yet despite constant appeals to founding values by politicians and pundits across the political spectrum, a perennial American eagerness to avoid framing our founding period in economic terms can make it strangely difficult to keep those all-important 18th-century finance issues in historical focus. The Tea Party movement, for example, has laid its claim on the founding period, and to a great extent that claim is indeed an economic and financial one. Casting the modern welfare state as a form of tyranny, in large part because of what they see as its excessive taxation, Tea Partiers invoke the famous American resistance to Parliament’s efforts to raise a revenue in the colonies without the consent traditionally given by representation. Seeing founding-generation American patriots as unified against British taxation (and frequently misrepresenting the politics even of the elites they invoke), the Tea Party defines its own anti-government, anti-tax values as essential to American identity.
The Tea Party thus edits out an alternative view of government that prevailed among the ordinary 18th-century Americans who were all-important to achieving independence. Those Americans opposed elites epitomized by the Boston merchant class, which the Tea Party, perhaps appropriately enough, so strongly identifies with. The internal struggle for American equality was as important to the founding as the high-Whig resistance to England, but the Tea Party can’t deal with the populist leaders and militia rank-and-file who wrote the socially radical 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution, or the Shaysites of Massachusetts who marched on the state armory, or the so-called whiskey rebels who inspired federal occupation of western Pennsylvania. American Revolutionary patriots all, those democratic-finance leaders had ideas about government’s role in ensuring economic equality that prefigured programs of the 19th-century Populists and the 20th-century New Dealers, the very programs the Tea Party wants to dismantle. Tea Party history therefore has to expunge the welfare state’s roots in America’s founding.
Liberals, too, can have a problem with the economic conflicts of the founding period. Alexander Hamilton’s national finance program, which Madison and Jefferson opposed with such intensity, was economically regressive. Under the influence of the founding financier Robert Morris, Hamilton made a stunningly successful effort to yoke American wealth to great national projects by beating down the popular-finance movement and promoting the interest (in both senses!) of the high-finance elites. Yet when some of today’s liberals look to Madison for support in critiquing Hamiltonian finance, they come up empty. Madison’s attacks on central banking represented anything but an argument for democracy and economic equality.

There is a lot more interesting stuff there, especially when it comes to the New Dealers claiming Jefferson's heritage in their reforms.  I've been struck by the irony of Republicans claiming the mantle of Lincoln, the savior of the Union, emancipator of slaves and supporter of federal grants for the transcontinental railroad and the Land Grant Universities, even though the party is now a states rights party, anti-civil rights, opposed to federal involvement in the economy, and with it base located in the former Confederacy.  Likewise, the Democrats claim Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, even though each would be anathema in today's Democratic Party. 

My favorite more recent example of a party claiming history it now has no business claiming is when Republicans claim that they are the party of civil rights, because liberal Northern (especially Northeastern) Republicans (find me a liberal Republican today) joined with LBJ to pass the Civil Rights Act over the opposition of segregationist Southern Democrats.  I've actually heard Rush Limbaugh make that claim.  He neglects to mention that most of those Southern Democrats became Republicans when Barry Goldwater ran in 1964 on throwing out the Civil Rights Act, and the national Republican party froze out the liberals in the Northeast, who became Democrats.  That is an amazing example of appropriating history which doesn't match reality.

Health Care Costs

From Business pundit via  the Big Picture:

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

The claim that doctors are overpaid is going to ruffle some feathers.  I would think that if large numbers of scholarships were available to doctors, we might be able to lower their annual pay once they are out of school, but paying off debts makes it much more expensive than necessary.  Unfortunately, the AMA has a century-long track record of keeping doctors from facing billing limits.

David Hume's Birthday

Crooked Timber (h/t Mark Thoma) marks David Hume's 300th birthday on May 7 (April 26-Julian calendar):

David Hume was born 300 years ago today. His influence on philosophy is well recognized. His influence on the social sciences, rather less so. Dan Sperber proposes that readers of his blog celebrate this anniversary by selecting particularly relevant quotes. Sounds like a good idea – let me start the ball rolling by stealing a particularly appropriate one from Cosma Shalizi.

It is excellent reading.  Commenters added their own favorite quotes.  My favorite came from commenter Geo:

Hume, Of Commerce:
“A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor, in a full possesion of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences, of life. No one can doubt that such an equality is most suitable to human nature and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor. It also augments the power of the state, and makes any extraordinary taxes or impositions be paid with more cheerfulness. Where the riches are engrossed by a few, these must contribute very largely to the supplying of the public necessities. But when the riches are dispersed among multitudes, the burden feels light on every shoulder, and the taxes make a not very sensible difference on any one’s way of living.
“Add to this that, where the riches are in few hands, these must enjoy all the power, and will readily conspire to lay the whole burden on the poor and oppress them still farther, to the discouragement of all industry.”

We could stand to consider that again today.

Flooding in the Red River Valley

For the third straight year, the Red River flooded, threatening the Fargo-Moorhead area.  This video is a nice tribute to the citizens of the valley.

The Case For Human Ingenuity

Niels Jensen says oil is not a good long-term investment:

There are essentially three reasons why I think oil prices will go through a rather dramatic correction over the next several years:

1. Many investors who, in recent years, have added commodities to their portfolios as a hedge will ultimately be disappointed by the lack of diversification this asset class offers;
2. Governments and regulatory authorities, both in Europe and the United States, have effectively declared war on commodity speculators, and the area will become subject to a lot more scrutiny and regulation in the years to come;
3. A number of new alternative energy forms are in much more advanced development than many investors realise and will, over the next 3-5 years, become serious alternatives to oil, particularly as far as transportation is concerned.

He goes on to mention the Volkswagen XL1:

Earlier this year, at the Qatar Motor Show, Volkswagen unveiled a remarkable new car called the XL1 (see pictures here and more details about the car  here), which is expected to go into limited production as early as 2013. The car runs on a 0.8 litre hybrid engine (combined TDI engine and lithium battery) capable of carrying two people at a top speed of 160 km/h (100 mph).

The XL1 can drive an astonishing 110 km/l (313 mpg) and emits only 24 g/km of CO₂ in the process. As an added bonus, the car can do up to 35 km (22 miles) in battery mode, i.e. with zero carbon emissions. A lightweight body of only 795 kg partly explains the impressive performance. The car has been 13 years in the making and is by far the most fuel efficient car the world has seen to date.

I think there are tremendous opportunities to improve fuel efficiency, but that way too many people believe that there isn't a limit to the amount of oil we can consume.  I would think that diesel-electric cars with electric motors replacing a mechanical transmission could improve efficiency, and that there should be smaller, essentially one-person vehicles to replace larger cars which generally only carry one person.  Unfortunately, not very many people realize how much we actually spend each year on vehicles, fuel, insurance and maintenance.  I estimated at least $3000 per vehicle per year, and probably more.  That is a lot of scratch.