Budgets are moral documents

Few people have put it as well as the National Catholic Reporter:

...what has become cliché during five years of the Bush administration is now glaringly apparent in the easily discerned outlines of its proposed 2007 budget: Cuts in vital programs that benefit the poor and middle class, continuing tax relief for the very wealthy and substantial increases for defense and Homeland Security.

If budgets are, as some contend and we would agree, moral documents, then this one suggests we have abandoned a basic sense of right and wrong and any notion that we are at our best when we strive to make life better for all, not just those who manage to accumulate wealth.

Before you shoot...

Chicago Tribune quotes hunters on Dick Cheney:

“He broke one of the 10 commandments of hunting," said Westchester hunter Mike Reynolds. "The protocol is that before you pull the trigger, you make sure what the target is and beyond.”

Like, umm, in Iraq?

UPDATE: Screwups have real-world implications.

What you don't know won't hurt us

Courtesy of today’s New York Times...

“Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.”

In my later days at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the place was led by a physicist named John Marburger. Who now has the most ridiculous job in America: science advisor to George W. Bush. (Kinda like being etiquette advisor to Genghis Khan.) Are we to take Bush seriously when he suddenly starts talking about strengthening science in America? The guy who takes pride in his indifference to education? Yeah, right. Straight from the White House archive:

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate the Secretary of Energy joining me today. He's a good man, he knows a lot about the subject, you'll be pleased to hear. I was teasing him -- he taught at MIT, and -- do you have a Ph.D.?

SECRETARY BODMAN: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, a Ph.D. (Laughter.) Now I want you to pay careful attention to this -- he's the Ph.D., and I'm the C student, but notice who is the advisor and who is the President.

A colloquy that doubtless sent shivers through millions of intelligent people all over America. "Oh, my God. Those creeps who used to knock my books on the ground when I was a kid... Those awful drunken frat boys who never had to study... One of them runs the country now. Bill Gates may own Microsoft, but this guy controls thousands of nuclear weapons!"

UPDATE: Speaking of Marburger, Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, annotates his latest appearance before Congress, available for viewing here. Evidently it wasn’t pretty.

More Bush priorities

In Bush America, there’s always plenty of money for advertising and PR. But when it comes to helping the people who are dying because they helped the U.S.A. win the Cold War, well, you know the rest...

Report: Bush Spent $1.4 Billion on ‘Spin’

The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday. With spending on public relations and other media included, federal agencies spent $1.6 billion on what some Democrats called “spin”...

...Trends in spending on PR and ad contracts were not documented, but a prior study by the minority staff of the Government Reform Committee found that spending on public relations contracts rose rapidly under the Bush administration. That report found that spending on contracts with public relations firms had increased to $88 million in 2004 from $39 million in 2000, an increase of 128%.”

White House Eyes Atomic Illness Cost Cap

The Bush administration is taking steps to limit costs associated with a benefits program for Cold War-era nuclear workers who developed cancer from radiation exposure, according to a White House document...

...the working group will discuss whether "administration clearance" should be required before groups of workers are deemed eligible for compensation, the document said. Under the program, created by Congress five years ago, workers get $150,000 plus future medical benefits... To get the special status granting them automatic compensation, workers must have radiation-related cancer and must have worked at a facility with poor records. Once granted the special status, they would not have to go through a lengthy process in which officials try to estimate how much radiation workers were exposed to.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., decried attempts to alter the program, saying, "Any effort by Department of Labor bureaucrats to limit these benefits would be a true injustice to these workers, their families and their memory."

Dick Cheney's idea of fun

Every once in awhile, the well-crafted images inadvertently fall away, and you can’t help but see the true character of the men who have taken control of America. So it was this weekend, when the details of Dick Cheney’s hunting trip emerged, after he became only the second Vice President (after Aaron Burr) to shoot another man while in office:

Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.

"This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets."  

That from the Humane Society of the United States, which has written incisively on the relationships between these kind of murderous hunting clubs and the Republican Party elite.

Matthew Scully is that rare public conservative whose religious values actually seem heartfelt, and actually appear to bring out his better angels. In his book Dominion, he has written broadly and passionately on how he believes his faith enjoins him to treat his fellow creatures -- from the factory farm to Dick Cheney’s “shooting fields.” While I come to these issues from a secular perspective, I admire his views, and recommend them to you.

When we look back and wonder how ordinary people could have tolerated -- or even justified -- slavery, we need only look to the way we tolerate and justify the most appalling forms of animal cruelty, done in the name of savage pleasure and pure profit, without even the justifications of scientific research.

Get a free college education, on the Web

Today I’d like to talk about something non-political and wonderful: the growing selection of free college courses now available as MP3s for Web download.

For years, I’ve been a fanatic Teaching Company customer. Their college courses are simply masterful. I’m finally getting the education I didn’t get in college: the philosophy, comparative religion, literature, linguistics, medieval and ancient history, intellectual history, archaeology... all the stuff I didn’t appreciate as a kid, but find utterly compelling now.

I have shelves full of their stuff. I could not possibly recommend any company’s products more highly. And now that they’re publishing newer courses in MP3 download format, their content is even more convenient. (And, since they’re waiving their steep shipping & handling charges for downloads, it’s an even better deal, too.)

But, as with everywhere else, the Web’s giving them some serious free competition. And it’s coming straight from the sources: the universities where the Teaching Company finds its professors.

The best I’ve found so far:

The University of California, Berkeley (flat out wonderful stuff).

MIT’s Open CourseWare program (which offers materials for dozens of courses, but audio downloads for only a relative few).

Purdue (dozens of courses, a bit inconsistent in both audio quality and content, and some of it locked down by password. But, even so, plenty of excellent stuff that’s currently free for download -- though check the copyright statement).

There’s even one lonely course from Harvard: an introduction to computers and the Internet for non-majors.

There are some disadvantages, for those of us who are spoiled by Teaching Company’s wares.

First, you have to wade through all the extraneous content about what’ll be on the midterm, what the prof’s office hours are, who the T.A.s are, etc., etc. Skip lightly through the first lecture and you’ll lose much of that.

Second, the Teaching Company’s content is neatly structured into bite-sized 30-minute lectures. The “real” college courses are the classic 50 minutes, 1:15 minutes, sometimes longer. That’s a hassle when you’re listening on an MP3 player that can’t set bookmarks. If I ever get some time and the right software, I may just chop ’em up myself.

Third, if you get really involved in a course that’s being given during the current semester, of course you have to wait for the new lectures to actually be delivered. (That’s where I am right now with Thomas Laqueur’s terrific UC Berkeley course, History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present. It’s already Sunday 2/12, and they haven’t posted Thursday’s podcast yet. Come on guys, I’m panting in anticipation!)

Fourth, some of these courses are only available in streaming video or audio formats. The clumsy solution: buy an $11.95 copy of Total Recorder and set it up to capture the streams, one at a time. Do it in the background while you’re working on something else. Or use a spare computer if you have one. It’s slow, but it works.

Fifth, occasionally you’ll have to worry about hassles like file naming and ID3 tagging, though the university podcasters seem to be improving about this.

But all these complaints are mere trivia when you consider how much incredible audio content is now available free. Let me make a few recommendations to start you out...

You’ll have to capture streams, and you’ll miss out on his wonderful visuals, but don’t miss Berkeley’s Fall 2005 course library for Alex Filippenko’s amazing Astro C10 / LS C70U Introduction to General Astronomy.

Also available primarily as streams, Berkeley’s US Foreign Policy After 9/11, which relies heavily on guest lecturers including some of the world’s most impressive foreign policy experts. (Incidentally, course coordinator Harry Kreisler has hosted a long-standing interview series at Berkeley, and he’s archived many of the most relevant interviews here.)

Biology’s been turned upside down in the past couple of decades: if your understanding of the subject is out of date, we highly recommend MIT’s introductory bio course. You may also like Roy Caldwell’s Animal Behavior at Berkeley. (That’s the behavior of animals, taught at Berkeley. Not the animal behavior of some of those who attend or live around Berkeley!)

If you haven’t studied psych in awhile, MIT’s Introduction to Psychology, Fall 2004 is a must-listen. Further into the social sciences, we’ve learned a lot from Steven Hillis’ Introduction to Sociology and Social Problems at Purdue. (Hillis may strike you as surprisingly conservative, especially if you’ve been fooled into thinking that academia is a vast undifferentiated blob of left-winginess.)

Like most content providers faced with the Internet, colleges will struggle to figure out their “business models” for posting free content. Most are still shying away: perhaps they think we won’t attend if we can get it for free. You can’t blame them, and it’s hard to know how this will play out.

But, all in all, I suspect that today’s resources will be just the tip of the iceberg. In a couple of years, there might be more audio and video course content available on the Web than even the most fanatic student can use. Even me.