Drew Miller is Back In Da' House

Drew Miller is/was one of the early and best Iowa progressive bloggers. He took a year or so off but he's back with a participatory (Kos- or mydd-like) blog called, Bleeding Heartland. I'll be hanging out over there and I suspect that it will become one of the go-to places for Iowa political news.

Welcome back Drew!

OpenCongress.org: Radical Transparency Whether Congress Wants It Or Not

I've been dying to blog about this site since I saw the beta call back in November. Opencongress.org aims to add much-needed transparency and usable search tools to open the often closed, and intentionally obscure workings of the United States Congress.

It is the first project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, founded by the same people who have launched the Participatory Culture Foundation and it's awesome Democracy Internet TV player. Co-creator David Moore says:

One of the problems we were aiming to address is that there is a lack of comprehensive, usable web resources for people and groups writing about bills and issues in Congress. The Library of Congress website, Thomas, doesn't do nearly enough to make Congressional information accessible -- meaning that political bloggers didn't have anywhere helpful to link when discussing Congress, that there wasn't a way for their readers to get the "big picture" behind an issue. The lack of public knowledge about what's really happening in Congress breeds apathy about political change in general.

OpenCongress helps close the information gap between political insiders and the public by bringing together official government information from Thomas (by way of GovTrack.us), news articles from Google News, blog posts from Technorati, campaign contribution data from OpenSecrets.org, and more -- to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

I've been on the beta user list and have been noodling around with it since November (December?), and I can tell you it is easy to use to find out what bills are going where. One can quite readily drill down to the excruciating details of bill language; the truly important stuff heretofore knowable and accessible in real-time only by staffers and industry lobbyists who help craft the actual bills.

One of the cooler features are the RSS feeds for the main site blog and for the interest areas that allow headlines to be streamed out to your web browser for quick access to breaking news and events.

Truly, this is a tool that has the potential to realize a lot of the promise that technology trend wonks like me keep spouting about networks and participatory culture. I suggest everyone at least give it a look and bookmark it for future reference.

Hard Facts on Nuclear Proliferation

The bad-old-days of the Cold War were a long time ago, but I still remember them like they were yesterday. A bad acid trip I had yesterday. Considering the media-induced lack of institutional memory among the general populace, most of whom were at the party with me yesterday, I thought it might be a good time to review the basics on nuclear proliferation and nuclear weapons. Just to make sure we're all on the same page.

Last week I heard some punk political organizer from Iowans for Sensible Priorities repeatedly state that the United States has 10,000 nuclear missiles. After the fourth of fifth time he said this I had to humiliate him in public. Even at the height of the spend-them-into-the-dust years of the arms buildup in the 1980's the U.S. never had more than about 1,000 missiles. Warheads yes, missiles no. These are important distinctions. It must be nice to grow up in ignorance of such concepts as mutually assured destruction and launch on warning.

We are edging ever closer to conflict with Iran over its weapons program. The IAEA has confirmed that Iran is pushing hard to build its centrifuge program. But no one who knows anything is betting on them getting a working nuke before 2010 at the very earliest. Our dauntless intelligence spooks have produced a "stolen laptop" from Iran, alleged to have weapons plans on it. In English, not Farsi. And Iran's President has declared their nuclear program "a train without brakes," which means he is probably thinks he has us by the short hairs. And he's probably right.

But before we get all shock-and-awe on anyone's ass, let's review shall we? All figures given here are from either the Union of Concerned Scientists or The Center for Defense Information.

All this is deja-vu all over again. Growing up in the 1970's and '80's I studied nuclear arms as an emphasis in my political science days while still entertaining dreams of being a Naval officer. So, it seems stupid and sad to see us going back down this path again.

And yes. I heard Dan Schorr this morning and am ripping him off. This is in the form of a quiz. Answers at the bottom.

1. How many nations possess nuclear weapons?

2. How many nations do not possess nuclear weapons?

3. How many nations have given up nuclear weapons or weapons programs?

4. What states are on the "threshold" of building nuclear weapons and could develop them quickly should they feel the need to do so?

Bonus Questions
5. What is the genreally accepted "total destruction" radius of a 15 kiloton (Hiroshima) bomb?

6. What is the generally accepted "total destruction" radius of a 1MT (standard strategic nuke) bomb?

7. Which produces more fallout and radiation, a truck based bomb detonated at ground level or a military airburst a 1000m?

Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs)

mounted under the wing of a B-52.
Answers

1. Nine. Here they are with their known arsenals¹. The numbers are in the format: Total Weapons, Strategic high-yield, presumably ICBM delivered/Tactical low-yield, presumably aircraft, IRBM, Cruise Missle delivered,

1. United States; ˜10,500, 7,200/3,300


2. Russia: ˜10,000, 4,000/6,000


3. France: 464, 384/80


4. People's Republic of China: 410, 20/390


5. Israel: ˜200, 0/200


6. United Kingdom: 180, 185/0


7. India: ˜60?, 0/60


8. Pakistan: ˜20?, 0/20


9. North Korea: ˜8? 0/8

2. 183 nations are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have vowed not to produce nuclear weapons. To-date only one signatory nation, North Korea, has renounced its status under the treaty.

3. Four. South Africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus (legacy USSR weapons).

4. Lots. Iran, Saudi Arabia, The Republic of China, Brazil, Syria, and Nigeria are the "threshold" states that one would rather not see have any nukes. Japan and South Korea both are known to have "crash program" plans on the books should the need arise.

5. Pretty much everything 1500 meters in all directions is vaporized. The heat effects will cause most flammable substances (including clothing and flesh) to ignite out to 2300 meters.

6. Blast effects vaporize everything for 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) Heat effects will burn everything that will burn out to 7km radius².

7. A ground-based explosive of the kind most likely to be used by non-state actors will shorten the damage radius but will "kick up" more of the radioactive debris that contributes to fallout. From a 15kt yield and depending on weather conditions and wind speed, people 30-40 miles downwind will receive doses fatal within days or weeks, those 40-60 miles downwind will have about aa 50-50 chance of survival. Long-term health effects will harm those 60-500 miles downwind.

The Clinton Administration, to its lasting shame, gave both Pakistan and India a slap on the wrist and a pass when they went nuclear. George H. W. Bush has merely added to his unsurpassed, nay eponymous shame by cutting a separate deal with India to let them continue to have the bomb and has let the politics of expediency allow Pakistan to continue its course despite the fact that Pakistan basically opened up a cash-and-carry DIY nuke store in the 1990's.

This shit isn't tiddly-winks with 737's into buildings or a few cc's of sarin or anthrax. When the balloon goes up -- as it assuredly will when some mad sheik or similarly crazy rich asshole finally gets their hands on one -- hundreds of thousands if not millions will die. Feel that pain, Bubba.

Sources:
1. CDI: http://www.cdi.org/nuclear/database/nukestab.html
2. FAS - Nuclear Weapons Effects Calculatior, http://www.fas.org/main/content.jsp?formAction=297&contentId=367

New Effective Networking Blog

enllc.blogspot.com

I'll probably post the more geek-oriented rants over there. Still will track meta issues of tech and society here though.

The Great "Eureka!" Moment in Cancer Research?

Cancer research has necessarily moved out of the periphery and into a more central role in my attention budget lately. So, I was fascinated to find the following article in The New Scientist today: Cheap 'safe' drug kills most cancers:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

An Open Source miracle, cancer killing drug?! It IS too good to be true!

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:

they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.

Here's a funny thing. This evening Liam asked me what cancer was and I told him that cancer was when cells got confused about what role they were supposed to be playing in the body and then they run wild causing all kinds of harm to the body and sometimes death. He thought about it and asked, "Will I get cancer?" In a typical parental move to head off any childish worries I said, "No."

"Why not."

"Because in a few years scientists will have discovered how to make the bad cells not take over the body, and basically they will have cured cancer," was my pat response. Appeals to future cure-all tech are a pretty staple part of soothing kids fretfulness about these sorts of things in our house.

But I really had no idea that we might be curing cancer, like right now. Amazing. Long way to go yet though. If you are interested in following the trials or donating to help the trials begin, follow the link at the beginning of the article to the U. of Alberta and Alberta Cancer Board.

Update: 2.22.07, 0730: Dr. Len of the National Cancer Institute wieghs in with a bit more detail, and with the right amount of caution.

How The Web Is Changing Us

This video from the Digital Ethnography Department at Kansas State University sums up how technology is changing everything.

I'm A Member of the Pigovian Club.

Huh? The Pigovian Club is a group of economists who advocate Pigovian Taxes.

What's a Pigovian Tax? A Pigovian tax is "a tax levied to correct the negative externalities of a market activity. For instance, a Pigovian tax may be levied on producers who pollute the environment to encourage them to reduce pollution, and to provide revenue which may be used to counteract the negative effects of the pollution. Certain types of Pigovian taxes are sometimes referred to as sin taxes, for example taxes on alcohol and cigarettes."

Harvard Economist and former member of the Bush Administration's Countil of Economic Advisors, Greg Mankiw has started the Pigou Club. In October he published the club manifesto in the Wall Street Journal.

With the midterm election around the corner, here's a wacky idea you won't often hear from our elected leaders: We should raise the tax on gasoline. Not quickly, but substantially. I would like to see Congress increase the gas tax by $1 per gallon, phased in gradually by 10 cents per year over the next decade. Campaign consultants aren't fond of this kind of proposal, but policy wonks keep pushing for it.

Why raise the gas tax? Environmental benefits, road congestion relief, relief from other government regulations aimed at reducing consumption, and lastly, more revenue for the budget.

With this nasty cold I am not able to be in Des Moines right this minute presenting to our legislators my own Pigovian tax proposal to raise the state tax on regular gasoline to 50-cents per gallon within four years. Typical tax and spend Democrat you might say. Wrong, I say. You can download the undelivered draft of my position paper here, small PDF.

But this is the plan in a nutshell: The key concept here is what is called tax shifting. Instead of taxing people on how hard they work, we will shift the tax burden to tax how much they consume or waste. Those who consume or waste less, pay less. Thus...

1. Raise the tax on regular gas by increments from 21¢/gal. to 50¢/gal. in 2011.


2. Give each Iowan an income tax refund equal to the mean per captia gas usage of the state times the current gas tax. For example, if in 2011 the mean per capita gas usage is 813 gallons of gas, multiply by 50¢, equals a $406.50 income tax refund


3. Keep the fuel taxes on E85, ethanol blended gas, and biodiesel about half the tax on standard gas

That's it. Most of the legislators I have discussed this with agree that it is a very interesting and quite probably workable idea. What they can't do is bring themselves to vote for any kind of tax increase on gas. I think this is just a failure of imagination and courage. The tax waste, not work meme is tailor made for conservatives of either party to use to convince the people of the state that this sort of tax strategy is in their interests.

Personal Update

It's been a hell of a start to the year. Business at Effective Networking is booming and it is keeping me very, very busy. On the home front, the mid-winter cold and flu season has finally run its course through the kids. However, I have come down with the sucking chest cold in the form of Rihnovirus. Ick. Liam had it a week or so ago.

Lastly, my mother is struggling with Chronic Lymphocyte Leukemia. She stats chemotherapy this weekend. Laura is going to Cedar Rapids this weekend to be with her and I will be taking some time off as soon as I am no longer contagious to provide some care for her as well.

Whether this means more blogging or less all depends on my energy level. So please bear with me and keep checking the site. You may have figured out by now that I do most of my posting on the weekends.

Are For-Profit Universities Economically Sustainable?

The following article appeared in last Sunday's New York Times, and encapsulates many of the concerns I and I think others have had about Ashford University. Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits:

PHOENIX — The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.

But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.

According to federal statistics and government audits, the university relies more on part-time instructors than all but a few other postsecondary institutions, and its accelerated academic schedule races students through course work in about half the time of traditional universities. The university says that its graduation rate, using the federal standard, is 16 percent, which is among the nation’s lowest, according to Department of Education data. But the university has dozens of campuses, and at many, the rate is even lower.

...

Many students accuse recruiters of misleading them, and the university’s legal troubles trace back to similar accusations of recruitment abuses. In 2003, two enrollment counselors in California filed a whistle-blower lawsuit in federal court accusing the university of paying them based on how many students they enrolled, a violation of a federal rule.

After the lawsuit was filed, the Department of Education sent inspectors to California and Arizona campuses. The department’s report, which became public in 2004, concluded that the university had provided incentives to recruit unqualified students and “systematically operates in a duplicitous manner.”

The university paid $9.8 million to settle the matter, while admitting no wrongdoing. But the department’s searing portrait of academic abuse aroused skepticism among many educators.

Those questions are likely to dog the university as it defends itself in the lawsuit, which a district court had dismissed but an appellate court reinstated in September. The university could be forced to repay hundreds of millions of dollars if it loses. It asked the Supreme Court last month to review the appellate ruling, arguing that an adverse outcome in the lawsuit could expose it to “potentially bankrupting liability.”

It is the function of a corporation to enhance shareholder value. Period. Delivering a good or service are merely the modus for generating the profits that feed the shareholders. A corporation that is well run may well have internalized the importance of delivering a high-quality product or service to achieve those profits. But shareholders may not always be satisfied with the level of growth in profits that diligent attention to quality may imply. This raises a larger question in economics and investing: it is appropriate to have near permanent expectations of growth for most or even many firms?

Let's examine the model of the for-profit education institution. It is probably true that during such a company's early, start-up days growth in revenues and profits may be rather spectacular as the company grows to a given size. At some point management may feel an optimal size has been reached. Such an optimal size is a fuzzy benchmark but surely includes such criteria as an ability to effectively hire and manage faculty and maintain a certain educational standard and graduation rate. It must be able to do this in order to ensure a product of reasonable quality such that customers will continue to patronize the establishment.

At that time, what the company really gets into is what is (one hopes) a long period of very slow or stable growth that produces regular, predicable profits. Nothing spectacular, just good old-fashioned blue chip margins. There are a large number of investors for whom high growth (and coincidentally, higher risk) investments are not appropriate; who put more value on an good, old-fashioned annuity investment. Such companies should be more attractive than they are.

But investors collectively have shunned such blue chip companies in recent years. Such a company will be punished by the Wall Street collective which is dominated by institutional investors and mutual funds who value growth stocks most highly. Furthermore, the business plan of the managers and venture capitalists may call for a medium term profit trajectory that rules out such staid business models.

Thus the drive for continuing growth in company size and profits will eventually see an educational institution grow to the point where the size dictates that quality will be reduced. This in turn leads to increased customer dissatisfaction -- higher drop-out and lower graduation rates, increased difficulty in achieving or maintaining accreditation -- which will put pressure on recruiters to continue to feed the maw of the massive education machine, a la the lawsuit now facing the University of Phoenix.

Most of the executives of Bridgepoint Education, Inc, the parent of Ashford University, come to their company by way of the University of Phoenix. In my dealings with some of those officials I am convinced that most of them are aware of the flaws of the University of Phoenix and started Bridgepoint to deliver a better quality education product.

A lot of Clinton's future is pledged to Bridgepoint's ability to deliver a quality education product over a long period of time. I think many of the readers will have their own anecdotes with regard to how well Ashford is doing in avoiding the pitfalls of University of Phoenix -- not just at the business model level -- but also in the areas of faculty, class, and workplace quality.

I think that the management of Bridgepoint will serve themselves, their employees, their customers, and (I hope not lastly as far as they are concerned) the City of Clinton by concentrating on a business model that embraces a high-quality, slow growth, long-term moderate profitability approach. The traditional VP trajectory; spectacular growth, IPO, additional growth to the breaking point will inevitably lead to a poor result for the whichever stockholders end up holding the bag (certainly not the management) and most importantly as far as I'm concerned for the City of Clinton.

Heartless Bastards Live in Iowa City

Saw these guys last night. Terrific show at The Picador (formerly Gabe's) last night. Very much worth the long drive and getting to bed at 3 a.m. They played this song as their encore.


The first album has more songs with "hooks" such at Gray, above. The second album is a little more pensive and complex. Too much fun going to a live show at a small club again. Been years and years since I did that.

Song of the Decade. Wolf Like Me by TV On The Radio

I haven't seen anyone rock this hard in a long, long time. Even David Letterman is blown away. Check out the Urge Overkill outro by Paul and the band at the end.



Big Hat Tip to The Union Thug for the heads up.

DMR: Iowa National Guard Equipment Levels 7th Lowest

Blizzard? Tornado? Flood? Outbreak? The Guard has half its gear in Iraq. Missions Overseas Sap Iowa Guard of Gear:

he Iowa Army National Guard has one of the worst equipment shortages of National Guard organizations in the country for responding to large-scale terror attacks or natural disasters, a federal report released Wednesday said.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said the Iowa National Guard had 42.5 percent of its authorized equipment inventory for nondeployed forces as of November 2006. That was seventh-lowest among the 50 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories.

However, there is no question the global war on terrorism has taken a toll on the Iowa National Guard's equipment inventory. In the fall of 2001, the Iowa Guard had 74 percent of its authorized equipment inventory, Hapgood said.

The federal report said the majority of state national guards have capabilities to handle typical domestic missions, but shortages exist and concerns remain about the ability to respond to large-scale, multistate events. The massive, state-led and federally funded response to Hurricane Katrina illustrates the Guard's important role in such events, the study added.

The Army has budgeted $21 billion between 2005 and 2011 to modernize the Army National Guard and expand its equipment inventory, the GAO report said. However, this equipment may be deployed to meet overseas demands, and the Army has not specified how much equipment will remain in the United States for domestic missions, the study said.

Go Bears!

Photo from WBEZ Chicago by Jason Crawford

Iraq Wrap-Up: Containing Chaos

This is a sort of wrap-up post following recent events. Clearly, the President's plan to add a division's worth of troops to the forces there will be a complete failure. Here is a month-by-month breakdown of the number of troops in Iraq since the beginning of hostilities. You can see that by adding 21,500 to the 132,000 already in country we will achieve a force just shy of the level we had in Nov. - Dec. 2005.

As Bush sends more young men and women off to Iraq, the country threatens to become even more of a meat grinder. The loss of four helicopters in the last two weeks to enemy fire indicates that the opposition has made some significant gains. Whether through tactical technique gains together with or possibly solely gaining weapons capabilities to begin to interdict the last reasonably safe transportation mode for coalition forces. How long do you suppose before they bring down a large cargo aircraft?

Also apropos of the increasing tactical nous of the opposition, John Robb points out the sophistication and planning clearly behind the Jan 23 attack that targeted Blackwater mercenaries and their client, a State Department Official.

• Hook. A State Department official protected by a Blackwater PSD (personal security detail) convoy was attacked.


• Line. QRF (quick reaction force) ground teams were dispatched from the Green Zone to relieve the convoy. These teams were ambushed. One retreated and the others were halted.


• Sinker. Two Blackwater Boeing Little Birds (small helicopter gunships) were dispatched to provide support. One was shot down and the other was damaged and forced to return to base. Recovery teams found the four bodies (one more died on the other helo that returned to the green zone) from the helicopter crash were stripped of their weapons.

Note that there is not a secret service, special forces, or regular army security detail for this State Department offical but a private mercenary team from Blackwater. I guess no one reads Gibbon any more than anyone reads Kipling.

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

Speaking of Fools... The President continues to send rather sharp hints to Iran to stay the hell out of Iraq. Hints that Iran will certainly ignore. Why?? Op. Cit. Kipling. They think they can outlast us and become the regional superpower. And we continue to stumble down the road to the conflict that will break the back of the US Military. John Robb again:

Here's a systems view of the escalating tensions between the US and Iran and why it will likely result in war. The current situation is open loop -- an open loop system is one where all participants are regularly adding inputs without any consideration of the output/outcome. Feedback loops, like direct diplomatic contact or the use of international bodies/mediators to adjudicate disputes, that could typically serve to mitigate further deterioration have been intentionally turned off by those that want this conflict to occur. As are result, inputs from allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia (both fearful of growing Iranian power), impetus from guerrillas/militias forcing sectarian conflict, fears over ongoing nuclear development, mutual military preparation for conflict, and a need to assign blame for escalating counter-insurgency failures continue to drive it forward. At some point in the not too distant future, unless the feedback loops are reinstated, the system will inevitably produce an outcome that will force a war.

Solutions? More talk less actions. This involves setting aside ideology and laying to rest the boogeymen status of nations such as Syria and Iran and engaging in a little good, old-fashioned Realpolitik to save our asses. Robb again:

How do we contain this chaos (?) has become the question upon which the entire global economy rides. The spread of this war would eliminate Iraqi oil production entirely and put at risk the production available from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran. It would also set-up the US, which should be the main force for global cooperation, for an extremely hard landing both domestically and internationally, which may take a decade or more to recover from.

The first and foremost approach to doing this is to lessen the potential of state vs. state warfare. A war between the US/Israel and Iran would quickly destabilize every state in the Middle East and allow them to fall prey to open source war like Iraq. The best method for lessening the chance of this war is to open connections with both Iran and Syria (with Syria as the prime target) to reduce their connectivity to non-state groups. This not only reduces internal dynamics (that breathing your own exhaust creates) it can also help to make it more difficult for global guerrillas to generate an attack (another black swan -- I'm thinking of attacks that could do this, are you?) that serves as a pretext for regional war. Other ideas can be found in a report by Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack at the Saban Center (Brookings) called "Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from and Iraqi Civil War.". This report is just the start, much more thinking needs to be done.

Democrats and Republicans both need to raise their gazes from the relative how-many-Marines-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin types of arguments about the "surge" or "escalation," or whatever which is completely beside the point. Instead, Sens. Biden, Hegel et. al. need to get busy dragging the Administration kicking and screaming into the reality-based world in time to save a few thousand lives. Because, this, shit is just the beginning of an ever-increasing death spiral.

Groundhog's Day

As I sit here the thermometer outside the kitchen window reads -3 F with a brisk wind. Which should serve as a good reminder for everyone that weather is local and short-term and climate is global and long-term. Weather is a highly variable thing subject to extremes while climate is the overall mean temperature. Important to remember as we freeze our asses off.

That said, here is an interesting article from the New York Times that also shows a bit of flair on the part of the headline writer(s): The Groundhog Emerged, and Sounded a Lot Like Al Gore:

Groundhog Day has been part of the Western calendar since around the fifth century, which means it has survived centuries of Catholicism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of the agriculture of cloned sheep.

But whether it will survive in an age of global warming was one question — albeit not the biggest one — raised by the awkward coincidence yesterday of Groundhog Day 2007 falling on the same day a report was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations.

In fact, both “El Niño” and “global warming” appeared in the official forecast read on Phil’s behalf at 7:28 a.m. yesterday by a spokesman for the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, an organization loosely affiliated with the Chamber of Commerce of Punxsutawney, Pa., whose usual population of 6,000 swells to around 20,000 for the annual announcement.

“El Niño has caused high winds, heavy snow, ice and freezing temperatures in the West,” the four-legged forecaster began his four-couplet decree. “Here in the East with much mild winter weather we have been blessed.

“Global warming has caused a great debate; this mild winter makes it seem just great,” he continued. “On this Groundhog Day we think of one thing. Will we have winter or will we have spring? On Gobbler’s Knob I see no shadow today. I predict that early spring is on the way.”

In its earliest incarnation, Groundhog Day or something like it was a pagan observance, marking the midpoint between the winter and spring solstices, according to historians.

Burrowing animals like the groundhog were said to have the supernatural ability to foretell an early spring. The observance merged at some point with the Christian holiday of Candlemas, and the tradition embodied in this proverb: “If Candlemas be fair and bright, winter will have another fight. If Candlemas brings cloud and rain, winter won’t come again.”