Eideard

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The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago—and could be even worse than that.

The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s. The new research involved 400 runs of the model with each run using slight variations in input parameters, selected so that each run has about an equal probability of being correct based on present observations and knowledge. Other research groups have estimated the probabilities of various outcomes, based on variations in the physical response of the climate system itself. But the MIT model is the only one that interactively includes detailed treatment of possible changes in human activities as well—such as the degree of economic growth, with its associated energy use, in different countries.

Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, says that, regarding global warming, it is important “to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science.” And in the peer-reviewed literature, the MIT model, unlike any other, looks in great detail at the effects of economic activity coupled with the effects of atmospheric, oceanic, and biological systems. “In that sense, our work is unique,” he says.

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She was the intern whose secret was kept for 40 years and he was the president who didn’t confine his affairs to a side room off the Oval Office.

But now Mimi Beardsley Alford, a retired New York church administrator, who as a teenager had an 18-month sexual relationship with President John F Kennedy, has finally decided to tell the story of those White House days and the impact the revelation of the affair four decades later has had on her life.

The relationship was exposed in 2003 in a biography of Kennedy that included a reference to JFK’s involvement with a Mimi Beardsley. She had not even told her parents or children of the affair. A New York newspaper found that Beardsley Alford had married, changed her name, divorced and was working for a Presbyterian church.

After the revelations Beardsley Alford said no more than to confirm that she was “involved in a sexual relationship” with the president from June 1962. But her agent, Mark Reiter, told the New York Times that she is now writing her own account of the relationship, in a book called Once Upon a Secret, to be published by Random House.

“As she thought about it, she said: ‘This is a story that I’d like to take control of, rather than have somebody else tell my side of it,’” he said.

Reiter said Beardsley Alford would not be serving up salacious details of the affair.

“She’s just not that type of person where she’s going to spill her guts about intimate stuff for the whole country to see,” he said. “The story has three acts to it: before the White House, during the White House, and then the really powerful part is what happens afterwards. What’s the impact on your family life, your marriage, knowing that this happened to you in your early life and you have chosen to keep it a secret?”

RTFA. Chuckles. An understanding of a different time.

Even though the prurient minds of professional moralists would have exploded across the landscape, the point is made that serious journalists didn’t consider bedroom stories worth reporting about in comparison to the end-of-the-world politics in play at the time.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The State Department will offer equal benefits and protections to same-sex partners of American diplomats, according to an internal memorandum Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent last week to an association of gay and lesbian Foreign Service officers.

Mrs. Clinton said the policy change addressed an inequity in the treatment of domestic partners and would help the State Department recruit diplomats, since many international employers already offered such benefits.

“Like all families, our Foreign Service families come in different configurations; all are part of the common fabric of our post communities abroad,” Mrs. Clinton said in the memorandum, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by a member of the gay and lesbian association.

“At bottom,” she said, “the department will provide these benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex partners because it is the right thing to do…”

Influential lawmakers also pushed for the changes — even drafting legislation requiring the State Department to offer these benefits — until Mrs. Clinton assured them that she would address the issue.

The “right thing to do” hardly influences bible-thumping reactionaries who could care less about equal opportunities, equal responsibilities or equal rights. We’ll probably get to hear them whining, tomorrow morning.

Good for you, Hillary!

Minnesota was looking for a bargain on the tiniest walleye fish, known as frylings, that the state stocks in some of its lakes. Wisconsin needed more of the longer fingerlings for its fishing lakes. So the neighbors have decided to share fish — Wisconsin’s frylings for Minnesota’s fingerlings — along with hundreds of other items: bullets for the police, menus for prisoners, trucks for bridge inspections and sign language interpreters.

Inmates in Minnesota may soon be pressing specialty license plates for Wisconsin drivers.

With governors from opposing political parties and residents who often share only sports rivalries, Minnesota and Wisconsin are being drawn into the unusual alliance by financial circumstance. The sharing, officials in the two states say, could save them $20 million over the next two years.

Lawmakers in at least nine other states, and countless cities and counties across the country, are also engaged in a kind of barter system, often allowing them to cut the size of government, split their costs and share services. Some of the makeovers might have made sense at any time, but the urgent political will to change — cut jobs, close offices and give up power — was absent before the recession.

“What you have is an economy that is forcing people to share,” said Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr., the county executive in Essex County, N.J., which (for $4 million a year) began accepting juvenile detainees this spring from neighboring Passaic County, which closed its own facility (to save $10 million a year).

RTFA. Many example of the Recession forcing people into perfectly sensible business practices instead of the usual sleazy eazy.

Too bad it takes a nationwide disaster to suggest forethought.

Marina Diaz knows each day could be her last when she leaves for school each morning. But that doesn’t stop her from making the trip from her home on the dusty outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a key battleground in Mexico’s drug wars, to El Paso, Texas, where she attends high school.

From the moment she catches a bus to downtown Juarez, she is mindful of her surroundings. This is a city that saw 1,600 homicides last year. She warily watches the federal soldiers patrolling the streets.

Diaz, 18, finally relaxes after she clears customs at a border checkpoint and passes the “Welcome to Texas!” sign greeting pedestrians at the intersection of El Paso Street and 6th Avenue in downtown El Paso. From there, it’s another five minutes to the Lydia Patterson Institute.

She is not the only student making the trip across the border each day. In fact, most of the students in the school do it: About 70 percent of the institute’s 459 students live in Juarez. Some are American citizens with Mexican parents; others are Mexican citizens who carry a student visa to any one of three U.S.-Mexico border checkpoints in El Paso that serve tens of thousands of students, white-collar workers and day laborers each day.

When she gets to the school each morning, Diaz changes out of her jogging pants and into her uniform skirt.

“Because of the people over there, I don’t feel comfortable with the men and stuff, so I wear pants,” she explains. “You definitely see a difference here. The streets, they are more clean here than they are in Juarez, and I think the people respect you a little more. You don’t have to worry about people giving you trouble…”

For students at Lydia Patterson, who live in Juarez and cross the bridge each weekday, the small, United Methodist preparatory school has become a safe haven in the months since drug-related violence in Juarez has intensified.

“My school is a home for me because I have teachers and they treat me like parents,” says Hazel Barrera, 18. “Here, they take care of us and they make us feel comfortable and safe.”

Education is so important. Here are these kids who not only have to travel over the border to have a chance at a decent education – and worry about whether or not they live through the journey.

RTFA. Not a hell of a lot of answers; but, it’s always worth having a clearer picture, an accurate understanding of what’s driving circumstances affecting all of us living in border states.

North Carolina lawmakers are pushing to give Apple Inc. a multi-million dollar tax break should the company bring an East Coast computer server farm to the state – an estimated $1 billion investment, according to a state official with knowledge of the recruitment efforts…

While it has been known that North Carolina lawmakers were working on changing tax rules to benefit one company, the name of the outfit has been kept secret. The state official said Catawba and Cleveland counties are potential sites…

The House Finance Committee on Thursday altered the proposed tax change so companies could qualify only if they locate in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties, provide health insurance, meet a wage standard, and forego other state grants or tax breaks.

“The bill ensures it’s going to go to an area of high unemployment. This reflects concerns many of us have had about economic development policy, that priority should be given to the neediest counties,” said committee chairman Rep. Paul Luebke, D-Durham.

The tax breaks could be worth about $46 million in the next decade, assuming the company reaches its $1 billion investment target within nine years of starting, according to a memo by legislative fiscal staffers that does not identify the company. The memo said no current company meets the criteria to receive the tax break and the Commerce Department knows of just one with the potential to qualify.

“It’s very specific to this project,” Luebke said of the tax breaks.

The conditions adopted Thursday, if approved by both legislative chambers and the governor, would push the project from the state’s urbanized corridor connecting Raleigh to Greensboro and Charlotte. In 2007, Google Inc. committed to spending $600 million for a server farm near Lenoir in the western North Carolina foothills. It opened last year…

“Given our economic situation in this state, with the rising unemployment, this really is critical,” said Rep. Jennifer Weiss, D-Wake, before the committee approved the bill and its changes.

My, oh my. Apple’s existing server facilities do a truly crappy and underpowered job at handling the traffic they already have. But, this sounds like a Google-level facility.

Whatever do they have in mind?

UPDATE: NC state legislature debated less than a minute – and approved the package.

“There’s one now. Get him!”
(His sweet spirit still guiding gently)

Liberty University will no longer recognize its campus Democratic Party club because its parent organization stands against the conservative Christian school’s moral principles.

The club, which has about 30 members, will no longer be able to use Liberty’s name, hold on-campus meetings, or be eligible for student activities money.

“I think it does the university a great disservice to stifle one side of the discussion simply because we are Democrats,” said Maria Childress, the club’s adviser and an administrative assistant at the school.

Brian Diaz, president of Liberty’s Democratic club, said he was informed of the school’s decision in a May 15 e-mail.

“The candidates supported are directly contrary to the mission of Liberty University,” the e-mail said.

Liberty has had a College Republicans club for years. The Democratic club formed in October and worked aggressively to elect President Obama.

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Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

U.S. communities are changing complexion as ethnic diversity grows in the American heartland. Though not new in California, Arizona, Texas or Florida, the change of demographics is a bit more surprising in southwest Kansas.

Finney County, Kansas, is one of six counties across the nation that became majority-minority between 2007 and 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau recently announced. The agency defines majority-minority as a county where more than half the population is made up of a group that is not single-race, non-Hispanic white.

Nearly 10 percent (309) of the nation’s 3,142 counties were majority-minority as of July 1, 2008.

“Why there?” people ask Tim Cruz, former mayor of Garden City, Kansas, the largest town in Finney County. And then, “How do you all get along? It’s just another melting pot you know,” Cruz says. “It makes it nice to have those different cultures. And sure they’re different — we have to understand what they celebrate and why they do it…”

At the Alta Brown Elementary School, the native language of about half of the 409 students is something other than English…

Much of the United States is looking more like Garden City. New census figures show more than one-third of the people in the United States are non-white and a staggering 47 percent of the population under the age of 5 are a minority…

For many immigrant residents, life in Kansas, even working at the meatpacking plants, is much better than where they came from. But Cruz wants the immigrants to know, in his words, that “the American dream is much greater.”

“We catch them trying to tell their kids they don’t need to go to college because this is a good life,” Cruz says. “We have to help educate them saying, ‘No, there is even a better life than doing this and your kids can get to do that.’ “

Ethnic diversity can be a dynamic that produces as much friendship and knowledge – as hatred. That decision is usually predicated on the behavior of those in power before the immigrant swell threatens entrenched political power.

That behavior doesn’t often offer more than a token of equality. The good will of the best of those in place is required to build harmony.

Canada leads the world in illegal computer file-swapping and the government needs to address the situation, says the Canadian Conference Board.

The independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Ottawa said as a result of lax regulation and enforcement, Internet piracy is on the rise in Canada. The board said it agreed with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s conclusion that Canada has the highest per capita incidence of unauthorized file-swapping in the world.

The board said the estimated 1.3 billion illicit downloads in Canada outnumber the 20 million legal ones by 65 times…

Board Vice-President of Public Policy Gilles Rheaume said, “Canada is earning a reputation, one that is not to be envied, as the file-swapping capital of the world.”

I’ll have to nudge some of my geek mates in the Great White North about their world-class reputation. Har!

Marines on patrol – “mine sweeper” leading – sure looks like Las Cruces!
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

U.S. and Afghan forces have killed 60 militants, almost half in air strikes, and seized one of the country’s largest ever drug caches over a four-day operation in southern Helmand province…

The troops were fighting for control of Loy Cherah Bazaar in Helmand’s Marjeh city, where they found 75 tonnes of poppy seeds, more than 17 tonnes of morphine, opium and heroin, and caches of weapons and equipment, the military said in a statement…

At least 29 of the militants died in air strikes on buildings used for drug making and strategic planning, which included attacks on foreign troops, the U.S. military said.

Weapons and military equipment found included pressure plates used to make roadside bombs, ammunition vests which can be modified into suicide vests, 27 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, and military-grade explosives.

Civilians were escorted from the bazaar during the operation, and an unmanned aircraft is now “observing the scene to detect any attempts by militants and criminals to change the conditions to falsely claim civilian casualties,” the statement said.

Civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO air strikes are a major source of anger among Afghans toward the nearly 80,000 foreign troops in the country fighting Taliban militants.

Manufacturing civilian deaths – real or imagined – is one of those tricks of military conflict that extends back through recorded history. Unfortunately.

Those unwilling to confront the contradictions that drive war are often equally willing to believe the worst. It suits their failure to join a struggle on honest terms.