Obsidian Wings

CPT Thomas J. Casey's Bronze Star

by Gary Farber

Published this morning in the Valencia County News-Bulletin of New Mexico: 

John Casey will tell you the story of his son. He will tell you Thomas J. Casey was always polite and well behaved as a child — had a great attitude, competitive and a team player. 

Casey will tell you Tom made it through the rigors of the Albuquerque Academy and graduated cum laude in 1997 from the University of New Mexico with majors in Spanish and Portuguese.

And Casey will tell you the part of his son's story that he dearly wishes was unwritten.

On Jan. 3, 2008, Army Capt. Thomas J. Casey gave his life defending the men in his unit while on a mission in Iraq. He was 32-years old.

In recognition of his actions, the Army awarded Tom the Bronze Star Medal with Valor. His father and family received the medal on his behalf during a ceremony last month at Fort Riley, Kan. The Bronze Star Medal with Valor is the fourth-highest combat award given by the U.S. Armed Forces.

To be awarded the medal with the "V" device, a soldier's team members must give testimony before the Army's Decoration Board.

From that testimony, and the investigative report written about the day his son died, Casey says he has a pretty good idea of what happened out in the "hinterlands" of rural Iraq.

Your migrating dinosaur Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Though I may be assuming that my foibles are shared by everyone my age, I think that American kids of a certain age, had a fascination with dinosaurs. So if that's the case, this, from the Guardian, discusses recent evidence for dinosaur migrations. What is the evidence?

Fricke's team attempted to reconstruct camarasaur migrations by measuring oxygen isotopes (variants of particular elements that have different numbers of neutrons in their nucleus) in their teeth. The work relied on the fact that ratios of two oxygen isotopes differ markedly in the waters of streams and lakes, depending on local environmental conditions, such as how high and arid the landscape was at the time.

The dinosaurs kept an unwitting record of these oxygen isotopes as they roamed the land, because the oxygen in the water they drank became incorporated into successive layers of enamel as their teeth developed.

Most of the teeth, from remains collected at Thermopolis in Wyoming and Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, were worn and retained only a month or two of enamel growth, but others were in far better condition with up to four or five months of enamel still intact.

The scientists analysed oxygen isotopes in the dinosaurs' teeth and compared them with ancient soil samples from their lowland habitats and bordering uplands. From this, they pieced together the dinosaurs' movements over several months of their lives, concluding that the beasts made seasonal migrations to the uplands. Studies of one tooth suggest the dinosaur left its lowland habitat to find food and water in the highlands and returned home within five to six months.

I don't know about any of you, but that is twenty kinds of cool to me. But this is an open thread, so anything that strikes your fancy, go for  it.

 

The future of Libya open thread

by liberal japonicus

This is an open thread for what's happening in Libya and anything related to that. If anyone has good links, especially to explanations of factions, people who may emerge, stuff like that, I'll try and move them up here as they appear.

I'm also wondering if the various gory pictures that I've been seeing in new reports represent a one off, because of Qaddafi's notoriety, or a crossing of a line, or something that's nothing particularly new because I've had my head buried in work here.  

The Last Refuge of Climate Change Skeptics

by Eric Martin

Kevin Drum recounts an intriguing tale of a Koch-funded, climate change skeptic (Richard Muller) who undertook a scientific study to test what were thought to be the hyped numbers about increased global temperatures.  A funny thing happened along the way: Muller's study actually confirmed that, as the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists holds, temperatures over the past century have been increasing, with a pronounced spike in recent decades.

Drum notes that the impact of these findings might be limited, though, because many long-time climate change skeptics have already abandoned the position that the Earth isn't actually warming (memo to George Will). But most in that camp haven't surrendered entirely. Instead, they've fallen back to what has become an increasingly familiar redoubt for those climate change denalists that lose confrontations with the available scientific data: They contend that, while the Earth is clearly warming, it's not from human activity.

Drum's allusion to yet another fallback position got me thinking about a clearer enunciation of the stages of evolution for climate change denialists, that goes something like this:

Stage 1.Climate change isn't real, temperatures aren't actually increasing, El Nino!, etc.

Stage 2. OK, the data can't be denied any longer, temperatures are in fact increasing, but it's not because of the activities of man or increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Stage 3. OK, OK, temperatures are increasing, and it is the result of man-made causes, but doing something to arrest the progress of climate change would simply be too expensive.

My prediction: When the likely catastrophic costs of inaction are fully revealed, we'll see some variation of the following:

Stage 4. We would have agreed to address global warming earlier, but the liberals and scientists were so smug, condescending, etc., and they failed to reach out and create an environment conducive to bipartisan cooperation.  

Your DIY Friday open thread

from Tony P. via liberal japonicus

hoisted from the comments and placed below the fold to heighten the suspense

Flat tax and pulling your own weight

by Doctor Science

Herman Cain has lured all the flat-tax advocates out into the open again, and I'm trying to find a more effective way to reply to them than banging my head against the wall and chanting "regressive! regressive!"

Here's a typical specimen, taken from the comments to Paul Krugman's blog:

Why should taxes be at a higher rate for higher income individuals?

In fact, why should taxes be based on income at all, if the services offered by government are not received based on income.
...
Largely, our taxes should be paid relatively equal amongst everyone, if we're so sure government should be doing what it's doing now.

Paul, if economics is not a morality play, explain to me why the objectives of your economic solutions are always to help the parasites of society while pretending that we're somehow MISTREATING them if we choose not to hold a gun to the rest of society's head to collect taxes.

The top 1% could pay far less % in taxes for all I care, as long as they're not withdrawing services directly from government, and not infringing on my freedoms.

Here's the metaphor I'm working on to try to explain how wrong this is.

Imagine a group of five people. They're in a room on the third floor of a building with no elevator, and they have 1000 pounds of assorted stuff to bring downstairs and stack outside the building. What's the fair way to do this?

The simplest solution, but only works in highly-specialized cases. Part of Defenestration, an ongoing installation by Brian Goggin at the corner of 6th and Howard St. in San Francisco. Photo by KayVee.Inc.

1. Everyone could bring down their own stuff. If the stuff is such that it's really easy to tell what belongs to whom, then maybe that would be the fair thing to do. This doesn't correspond to taxation at all, but to purchasing. No-one's life is easier, there are no burdens shared or economies of scale, but it's easy and fair.

2. Now suppose the group is a band: 2 guitarists, bassist, drummer with a full kit, and the guy who plays the harmonica.

Ron Woods' painting of the Stones performing in 1975, by which point they definitely didn't have to carry their own equipment.

Clearly the equipment burden is distributed very unevenly, and they'll never get to the gig on time if everyone is only responsible for their own instrument. So they decide that each person takes down about 200lbs of stuff, to distribute the work more evenly than the burden. This is the flat tax: one-fifth of the population (by wealth) takes down one-fifth of the stuff, the taxes. It looks fair: the burden is equally shared, everyone pulls their own weight.

3. But now, suppose the five people are a family:

1. grandma, age 75
2. dad, age 45
3. mom, age 45
4. son, age 20
5. daughter, age 10

and they're taking the stuff downstairs to load into the van and go on a trip together.

[I couldn't find a good picture to illustrate this scenario -- suggestions wanted!]

The 20-year-old son is probably *much* stronger than anyone else. Grandma may have trouble getting down with much more than herself, and while the 10-y.o. is pretty bouncy, she can't really take all that much in any one trip. The parents fall in between.

Is it fair if the son ends up bringing down 600lbs of the stuff, while Grandma brings only 30lbs and the others divide up the rest? Yet I assume we'd all agree that this would be the *reasonable* thing to do, even though it means everyone doesn't "pull their own weight".

In this metaphor, the strong healthy young son represents the wealthy, the people with the most money=strength. This is *progressive taxation*: we're all on this trip together, so we help each other out.

The fact is, speaking as someone who's been poor and who's been well-off, when you're poor each dollar and each percent of income going to taxes *hurts more*. For both poor and wealthy to pay 20%, say, in taxes is *not the same thing*, because it's not the proportion of your income that makes the difference, it's how much it changes the kind of life you can live. When I was making only $10K/year (30 years ago), $1,000 was a monstrous expense, more than I could bear to think about. When we had an income of $80K, $8K was a *lot*, but not more than we could afford for something like a new roof. It had to be budgeted, but it wasn't a catastrophe. I'm not sure what we're going to take in this year, but 10% would make me sweat -- yet not *panic*, as it did when I was truly poor.

Maybe that should be the metric: If you merely *resent* your taxes, you're not paying too much. It's only when they make you at least break a sweat that you might deserve some relief.

A flat tax is like crushing Grandma and little sister under a burden you could bear, because "it's fair!" and "everyone should carry their own weight".

Miyankoshi, from Sixty-nine stations of the Kisokaido, by Hiroshige. Sometimes you carry mom, sometimes mom carries you.

Hamlet's Father: Orson Scott Card and the nightmare of the patriarchal family

by Doctor Science

Last month there was quite a uproar in the sf/fantasy realm over Orson Scott Card's novella Hamlet's Father, a re-working of Hamlet in which Hamlet's father turns out to have been a gay child molester. Rose Fox at Publisher's Weekly has a good summary of the firestorm; as she says,

But this is the thing about offensiveness grenades: they may look entirely inert for so long that you forget they’re dangerous, but sooner or later, they explode.

One reason for the uproar is that OSC (as he's often known) is outspokenly anti-homosexual -- yonmei's posts on Dissecting Orson Scott Card go into all the detail you can stomach.

"Hamlet's Father" was originally published in The Ghost Quartet, four sf/horror novellas edited by Marvin Kaye, so I got it out of the library and read it to judge for myself. What I found was that the people objecting to the story (who actually read it, that is) were mostly IMHO reading it wrong. This is not surprising, because IMHO OSC *wrote* it wrong.

William Alexander at Rain Taxi is wrong when he describes the "punch line" as:

"Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people.

And Publisher's Weekly is wrong to say:

the focus is primarily on linking homosexuality with the life-destroying horrors of pedophilia

I disagree. The story is not in any developed way about homosexuality, it is about child abuse. In that respect, it's very much like the rest of OSC's fiction, which focuses on the figure of an abused child with a consistency I can only call compulsive.

So (IMHO, IMHO, it's all just A Theory Which Is Mine) OSC wrote it wrong because he's unable to look clearly at the pictures he himself paints. A basic rule of fiction writing is "Show, Don't Tell" -- and what OSC *shows* is the traditional, patriarchal family as a nightmare of abuse, while what he *tells* is that these are the only "real families" worthy of respect.

I am cutting here for:

TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of fictional and real-life child abuse, emotional and sexual. Survivors take care.

SPOILER WARNING: post and comments may contain spoilers for any work by Orson Scott Card.

PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY WARNING: includes analysis and speculation about the psychological makeup of a living person, verging on Real Person Fic. May contain trace Freudian concepts.

if i only have one life to live....

by russell

let me live it as a blonde!

Or, at least, as a Swede.

Worth a read, it's quite short.  If you don't have time, I'll boil it down:

1. Americans have no clue about the level of wealth inequality in the US
2. To the degree that they have druthers on the topic, what they'd really like would be approximately the distribution of wealth found in modern Sweden

This holds true across gender, age, political affiliation, and income bracket.

What you don't know won't hurt you, unless it does.

The first hit of Homestuck is free

by Doctor Science

In recent months my primary fresh fandom has been Hawaii 5-0, but now that Season 2 has begun we've broken up. It's not me, show, it's you --

Steve McGarrett (back to camera) has a few questions for a witness. You can't tell in this still from episode 2x03, but the guy's arm is in a sling. Also, it turns out he hasn't done anything wrong.
-- but I'll talk more about the militarization of American TV police in another post.

So being in the market for a new fandom, I decided to check out the Sprogs' latest interest: Homestuck by Andrew Hussie (AH) at MS Paint Adventures. It started out as a webcomic about an interactive game, I guess, but by now I'd have to call it a web narrative, or indeed a web *epic*. I really hope to see it nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story next year; IMHO it certainly deserves to win, not least because it's really science fictional.

A young lady stands in her bedroom. Due to a violent storm, her house has just lost power, along with her wireless internet connection. This has severed her link to a popular video game she was playing with a young man at a critical moment. That young man is relying on this young lady to reestablish a connection somehow. See full-sized at MS Paint Adventures.

Your dirty words Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I'm thinking this is a more appealing title than my first thought, which was something along the lines of 'Your blog rules Friday open thread'. But more below: