as always:
It is best to read this journal from the beginning. . .
<http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2006/02/08/>
it makes more sense then. ....
or just explore the journal at: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/>
may i recommend: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/01/04/>
and a follow up to that: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/10/12/>

and I do not know him and he does not know me - but it seems through Harvard our existences are intertwined; therefore, noting this is not an endorsement either way, but in the need to ask the readership of this journal to remain vigilent (as the bush leage asked of america but not for it's bad influence on america), I ask readers to keep abreast of www.whitehouse.gov and to help make sure Omaba and his harvard teams stays the course they claim to be on. . . for HUMFErs are in his ears as they are in mine - see previous entries. . .
-------------------------------------------

the HUMF will get me on the medical insurance thing - the lack of secure work, indeed, the spherin block when school was starting up alone prevented it . .. it was to ba a tactic all along- see previous entries . . .

washingtonpost.com:

COBRA Too Costly for Many Unemployed, Report Finds

By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2009; D02



The cost of buying health insurance for unemployed Americans who try to purchase coverage through a former employer consumes 30 percent to 84 percent of standard unemployment benefits, according to a report released yesterday.

Because few people can afford that, the authors say, the result is a growing number of people being hit with the double whammy of no job and no health coverage.

In 1985, Congress passed legislation enabling newly unemployed Americans to extend their employer-based health insurance for up to 18 months. But under the program, known as COBRA, the individual must pay 102 percent of the policy's full cost.

"COBRA health coverage is great in theory and lousy in reality," said Ron Pollack, whose liberal advocacy group, Families USA, published the analysis. "For the vast majority of workers who are laid off, they and their families are likely to join the ranks of the uninsured."

A health insurance policy for the typical single person consumes 30 percent of the average unemployment benefit, the survey found. In the District, Maryland and Virginia, the price of a standard COBRA family plan is three-fourths of the average unemployment check.

News yesterday that the unemployment rate jumped to 7.2 percent adds urgency to the problem, Pollack said, because employment and health insurance are often intertwined.

For every 1 percentage point rise in unemployment, the number of uninsured Americans climbs by 1.1 percent, according to an analysis last spring by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent research group.

Pollack and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the new report highlights the need to include health insurance subsidies in the economic recovery package being crafted this month.

"Without that," Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said, "they simply cannot afford to pay for temporary continuation of their health insurance."

But Nina Owcharenko, a health policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it would be wiser to offer unemployed Americans a broad range of health insurance options, including high-deductible private policies or new state-based programs.

Given how expensive COBRA is, she said, alternatives would "save the individual money and save taxpayer money."

========

think of COBRA as CIA biological research automatons . . . owcharenko? ooffensive (of or CO) workshop coke (mkultra) harvard automaton research experimentla neurobiology kevin/trial operation. . .

and note the CC writing this - and th3 connolly again - see prevosu etnries . . .

from boston.com (and the like romney note I sent . . . ):

STEERING INTO ECONOMIC HEADWINDS
From change agent to 'comforter in chief'
It's a new deal for the governor, as the slump into recession makes budget cuts, not campaign dreams, his focus
By Matt Viser and Frank Phillips, Globe Staff | January 11, 2009

His oft-repeated campaign mantra of "Together we can" meant that the people of Massachusetts could unite and accomplish great things. But when Governor Deval Patrick picked up his cellphone last week and braced a Springfield official for more bad economic news, he applied similar sentiments to a starkly different situation.

"These are big challenges ahead," Patrick told the official. "But we'll get through them. We have to lean on each other."

In fact, Patrick is recasting himself, halfway through his term, from inspirational visionary to crisis manager, what he described in an interview last week as "comforter in chief."

He finds himself mired in a national financial crisis that is forcing him to cut deeply into the state budget, including social programs for the mentally retarded and the blind. As the state continues to lose revenue by the billions, Patrick is contemplating cuts in state aid to cash-strapped, hard-luck cities such as Worcester, New Bedford, and Springfield.

This is not what Patrick signed up for when he campaigned on a progressive agenda in 2006, and promised, in consistently soaring rhetoric, to give the state's residents better educations, make their neighborhoods safer, and reduce their property taxes.

In 2009, rescuing a Turnpike Authority on the brink of insolvency - not enriching education for kindergarteners - promises to dominate the agenda. He is pushing for higher tolls and is reluctantly contemplating a higher gasoline tax. Meanwhile, he has been shuttling to Washington to seek a desperately needed infusion of federal funds, a piece of President-elect Barack Obama's economic stimulus proposal, that could help keep the state's rising unemployment rates from spiking even further.

During the fall's budget cuts, he often sat alone in his State House office, sometimes late into Saturday night, going through the budget, line by line. "This stuff is personal," he said last week. In a series of interviews, Patrick made clear that the economic crisis has not caused him to abandon his agenda, though he acknowledges that the goals he set will take longer to realize - and he is already talking about seeking a second term.

Yet he also said his job during the past two years has at times seemed like a "daily slog," and lately he's had to adjust his mindset and take on new roles.

"I am finding myself in the role of sort of comforter in chief or reassurer in chief. There is so much anxiety out there. People are really worried," Patrick said as he prepared for his annual State of the State speech, which he will deliver before the Legislature and a live statewide TV audience on Thursday.

"There's not going to be enough money. All right? Just to be clear," he said. But he remains committed, he said, to using the levers of government to help people through rough times.

"And at a time like this, frankly, more people than usual are looking to government at all levels," he said. "We have to do everything we can - I'm trying to do everything I can - to step up."

Voters have so far responded positively to Patrick's approach to crisis management. A Globe poll last month found that he has a 64 percent favorable rating among Massachusetts adults, an unusually high mark for a governor in the midst of financial crunch. But that will be tough for him to keep.

Those who have seen governors' careers defined by fiscal crises say Patrick has escaped political backlash so far because the brunt of the financial woes have yet to hit. Michael Widmer, the president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, said Patrick has moved forcefully to deal with the pending fiscal crisis, but without ruffling many feathers.

"It's a thankless and unwelcome task," he said. "But he's stepped in in an aggressive way, in a way he needed to."

Still, the coming months will pose incredible challenges that will test the governor, and continue to lead him down a path he did not envision, at least not publicly, when he assumed office in 2007 as a liberal, the state's first black governor, and with a strong belief in the power of government to improve people's lives.

"This is not what this was supposed to be all about," said Stephen Crosby, dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a member of Patrick's transition team.

Patrick, whose significant rhetorical skills and relentlessly upbeat tone helped him win a long-shot bid for governor, is now looking to set the right tone for changed times.

In his midterm State of the State address this week, the governor said, he will stress joining together to fight adversity - while not losing sight of the important, but sometimes unrealized, goals that were the hallmarks of his first two years.

"I for one don't feel like the mood of the Commonwealth is for a soaring address," Patrick said. "I feel like the mood of the Commonwealth is to have us level with them, to really talk about just how hard this is going to be. And what I'd like to do is to rally people to keep going, and to hang in, and to hang onto each other."

Still, despite the dark clouds looming as he enters his third year as governor, the governor seems to genuinely be enjoying the job. In contrast to his first year and half in office - when House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi strode the State House as the dominant player - Patrick is emerging as a stronger presence.

His friend Barack Obama is about to move into the White House, a political development that is giving Patrick a broader national profile.

As he traveled to Washington for the president-elect's speech on the economy last week, Patrick got his shoes shined at the airport and took a commercial flight, riding in coach both ways and declining an offer to upgrade to first class. He was never far from his Blackberry. At one point, he pulled out his Vaio laptop and found an e-mail from Yo-Yo Ma asking if they could hang out during the inauguration.

In interviews during his trip Wednesday and Thursday and in his State House office with powder blue walls and soaring ceilings on Friday, Patrick seemed more assured and confident as he fielded questions from Globe reporters. Patrick seems to have grown into the job; in particular, he has found a more effective approach to dealing with the Legislature, which is controlled by his fellow Democrats but has steadfastly refused to let him direct the agenda.

"There are days it drives me crazy, I mean don't get me wrong," he said, discussing the tensions between his office and the Legislature. "And I love the job, even on bad days I love the job. But I have bad days."

By the end of the legislative session, Patrick had a series of accomplishments to tout, including a $1 billion package to bolster the state's life sciences industry, several new laws promoting environmental policies, and tighter corporate tax codes.

But the governor was also criticized for floating proposals that initially seemed short of specifics, and he was unsuccessful in winning approval for several items on his agenda, including licensing three resort casinos, allowing communities to raise local meals and hotel taxes, and reforming the state's Criminal Offender Record Information system.

A turning point for Patrick appeared to occur after his casino proposal went down in dramatic defeat. His critics said he was trying to manage the state like a chief executive, without effectively engaging the Legislature. But out of the political rubble left by the casino battle, Patrick and DiMasi, who opposed the plan, forged a tighter relationship.

This year, Patrick said, he hasn't decided whether to file casino legislation. But he clearly has a more pragmatic approach to the contentious issue. "I'm not going to file something that isn't going anywhere," Patrick said. "There's a conversation there we have to have."

Patrick's ties to Obama are paying dividends. On his trip to Washington last week, he joined five other governors to meet with the president-elect and continue their lobbying for states to share a big piece of the federal stimulus package. He was front and center in the audience at Obama's speech Thursday. Later, when the five governors met with the media, Patrick was a key voice at the press conference.

In an interview after Obama's speech, he declined to discuss missteps he believes he has made. And, back on Beacon Hill the next day, he remained philosophical about what he must do to handle the political and economic troubles ahead.

"These are the circumstances we've been dealt," he said.

Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com. Frank Phillips can be reached at phillips@globe.com.
=========================

boston.com:

Pay as they go
Law that lets retired lawmakers boost their pensions sparks outrage
By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff | January 11, 2009

It might have seemed the height of audacity when J. James Marzilli Jr., charged with attempting to grope a woman, asked the state to nearly double his pension, just 11 days after he resigned from the state Senate in disgrace.

In fact, he was following a well-trod Beacon Hill tradition of cashing in on a law that allows veteran state legislators who retire or fail to win reelection to receive staggering pension increases worth thousands of dollars a year.

A Globe review shows that 14 former legislators are currently drawing significantly increased pensions under the law, including several who left amid their own ethical and criminal troubles.

The law, originally created to compensate civil servants who lost jobs when new administrations took over, was expanded by the Legislature 59 years ago to provide the same benefits to lawmakers - even though their employment depends on voters, not the political whims that can threaten civil servants. Now, as the state faces a deep financial crisis and is taking painful steps including layoffs, the generous benefit for departing legislators is sparking outrage.

"It's ridiculous," said L. Scott Harshbarger, the former attorney general of Massachusetts and onetime president of Common Cause, a government watchdog group. "How in the world is it appropriate, necessary, or consistent with any reasonable public policy that if you chose not to run for office or are defeated in running for office that you get an enhanced pension? It just seems to me totally unreasonable, and for elected officials this does not enhance their image."

Legislators, however, have shown little interest in scaling back what one pension official called a "special quirk" in the system.

Vincent J. Piro, a former state representative from Somerville who lost his seat after he was charged with taking a $5,000 bribe, used the law to boost his pension from about $6,750 - not including annual cost-of-living adjustments - to $18,872.

Richard Voke, a former House majority leader from Chelsea who retired in 1998 after losing a bitter fight for the speakership to Thomas M. Finneran in 1996, upped his pension from about $14,779 to $28,193.

Francis G. Mara, a former state representative from Brockton who retired in 1996 after he was fined for taking gifts from insurance lobbyists, increased his pension from about $3,783 to $18,921.

"It's not doing anything wrong," said Mara, 58, who is now a State House lobbyist for Arbella Insurance and Techlink Entertainment, a company that makes technology for video lottery terminals, slot machines, and other gambling systems. He said that when he was retiring, another senator told him about the law and suggested he take advantage of it.

"That was a legal mechanism," he said.

Some may question the practice, he said, but "you can have these debates over many things in society."

Indeed, efforts to repeal special pension benefits have been traditionally met with fierce resistance on Beacon Hill, said state Representative Harriett L. Stanley, a West Newbury Democrat and longtime critic of such benefits.

"We're talking about the third rail here," she said. "It's going to be absolutely impossible to make meaningful reform unless we acknowledge the problem, and that will be one tough battle."

The law, as it was amended in 1950, allows any elected official under age 55 "who has completed twenty or more years of creditable service and who fails of nomination or reelection" to apply for a pension increase.

Using a formula based on the lawmaker's age, years of service, and annuity, the law can boost a pension by as much 400 percent. Pension officials say the requests are almost always granted unless the lawmaker was convicted of a crime. No wonder, some say, that lawmakers created the statute.

"If you're going to stick a little juicy one in there for yourself, why not put one in there if you can't get reelected?" said Nicholas Poser, a Boston pension lawyer. "The 'failed of nomination' stuff is, to my mind, clearly directed at failed politicians."

Over the years, Democrats and Republicans have taken advantage of the perk.

"They're going to say, 'Well, the statute provides me access to this benefit, and why would I not take it?"' said Joseph E. Connarton, executive director of the state Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission.

Alfred E. Saggese Jr., a Winthrop Democrat, got his pension boosted to $18,872, after retiring from the House in 1991, a year after he missed more roll call votes than any other member, except for one who was in poor health.

Piro - who was charged in 1984 with taking a $5,000 bribe, saying he had to "grease a few guys," for a liquor license - was eventually acquitted, and has received an increased pension since 1991.

Recent recipients include Christopher J. Hodgkins, a former Democratic representative from Lee, who retired in 2003 and upped his pension from about $4,889 to $22,253, and John Businger, a former Democratic representative from Brookline who was ousted from office in 1998 and increased his pension from about $15,083 to $23,301.

Marzilli's request, to bump his pension from $14,000 to $27,000, is pending before the State Retirement Board, which says it will not rule on the increase until his criminal case is resolved.

Faced with the prospect of deep budget cuts, some say the appetite for change is growing on Beacon Hill.

The Legislature recently created a 15-member commission to look at ways to overhaul the pension system.

It was supposed to meet in September, but its members have yet to be appointed. Still, if the panel forms, and lawmakers look for changes, some say the perk for departing legislators could be targeted.

"These kinds of things become symbols that reinforce people's cynicism," Harshbarger said.

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.
===============

oy . . .

yahoo.com.news:

Bush defends interrogation record
Patrick O'Connor Patrick O'connor Sun Jan 11, 11:13 am ET
President Bush on Sunday defended controversial interrogation measures established by his administration, arguing that techniques like water-boarding helped save American lives.

“The techniques…were necessary and are necessary to be used on a rare occasion to get information to protect the American people,” Bush said during an expansive exit interview that aired on Fox Sunday.

Citing an interrogation with Al Qaeda strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, which included simulated drowning, otherwise known as “waterboarding,” the outgoing president said, “We believe the information we gained helped save lives on American soil.”

The Bush administration has been criticized by civil liberties advocates and others for the use of, and legal justifications underpinning, these harsh interrogation methods. President-elect Barack Obama has already promised to review these policies when he takes the oath of office later this month.

In the interview with Fox News Sunday, Bush joked that his administration has been “slightly criticized” for its policy to push the legal limits of the rights, the treatment and the interrogation of suspected terrorists detained by U.S. military and intelligence officials, or cooperative governments.”

The president defended those measures repeatedly on Sunday, saying, “I firmly reject the word ‘torture.’ Everything this administration does had a legal basis to it; otherwise, we would not have done it.”

In a separate interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Obama said, “From my view, waterboarding is torture.”

Whatever Bush administration policies he overturns, the president-elect wants to protect intelligence officials at the Central Intelligence Agency in order to do their jobs.

“At the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working hard to keep Americans safe,” Obama said on ABC. “I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”

The outgoing president is “confident” that his successor “understands the nature of the world and understands the need to protect America.” But Bush hopes Obama and his intelligence team “take a hard look at the realities of the world and the tools now in place to protect the United States from further attack.”

In the exit interview, Bush specifically mentioned Mohammed, whose interrogation became a flashpoint in the broader legal debate about the rights of suspected terrorists detained abroad.

Mohammed, a top Al Qaeda strategist, was arrested in Pakistan and eventually flown to a secret detention site in Poland, where he reportedly endured a series of harsh interrogation methods, most notably waterboarding. But Bush administration officials have repeatedly argued that that session with Mohammed gave them leads to prevent other attacks.

“Look, I understand why people can get carried away on this issue, but generally they don’t know the facts,” Bush said of his critics on Sunday.

“But I am concerned that America, at some point in time, lets down her guard,” the president said. “If we do that, the country becomes highly vulnerable.”
==============

yahoo.com.news:

Speedy trial issue lands before US Supreme Court
By JOHN CURRAN, Associated Press Writer John Curran, Associated Press Writer Sun Jan 11, 1:18 pm ET
BENNINGTON, Vt. – After he was charged with hitting his girlfriend in the face, career criminal Michael Brillon sat in jail without bail for nearly three years, going through six public defenders before being tried for assault.

The delays paid off — for Brillon: A Vermont court threw out his conviction and freed him from prison last spring, saying his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial had been violated.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up the case this week, trying to decide if delays caused by public defenders can deprive a criminal defendant of that right. In particular: Whether governments can be blamed for such delays since they're the ones who assign and pay the lawyers for indigent defendants.

Forty states and 15 organizations — state governments, county governments, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a victim's rights' group — are backing the Vermont prosecutor's appeal of the ruling, worried that if it stands criminal suspects will try to game the system and get the result Brillon did.

"You're greasing that slippery slope," said David Parkhurst, an attorney with the National Governors Association, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the prosecutor's appeal. "That's the big concern here."

Brillon, a 46-year-old construction worker whose criminal past includes convictions for sexual assault on a minor, felony obstruction of justice and cocaine possession, was charged with aggravated domestic assault over the 2001 incident with his girlfriend, who was the mother of his child.

Held without bail, his case inched along as lawyer after lawyer asked for postponements and eventually withdrew or was replaced at Brillon's request.

The first got an evidentiary hearing postponed because he was moving his law practice. He was fired by Brillon, who claimed the lawyer had failed to communicate with him.

The second reported a conflict of interest that prevented him from continuing — a day after he'd been appointed.

The third quit after telling a judge Brillon threatened his life during a break in a hearing.

Brillon fired the fourth, and the fifth quit, citing changes to his contract with the state public defender's office.

The sixth took the case to trial in 2004, when Brillon was convicted and sentenced to 12 to 20 years in prison because he was a habitual offender with three prior felony convictions.

However, Brillon appealed on the speedy trial claim, and the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in his favor, saying the delays were the fault of the state. The ruling outraged victim's rights' advocates and others, both because Brillon was freed and for fear that other suspects would take his cue, hoping for a similar outcome.

"The motivation would certainly be there," said Erica Marthage, one of the Vermont prosecutors who will appear at Tuesday's oral argument before the Supreme Court in Washington.

Brillon's current lawyer, whose position has been buttressed by friend-of-the-court briefs by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union, acknowledges that Brillon had a role in some of the delays.

Still, says attorney William Nelson, the criminal justice system is primarily responsible.

Brillon was without any appointed counsel at all for six months and was held without bail for nearly three years, despite telling judges he wanted to go to trial, Nelson said.

The U.S. Solicitor General, representing the federal government, has filed a brief denouncing the Vermont ruling and is seeking permission to use 10 minutes of prosecutor Christina Rainville's allotted 30-minute oral argument to make the case for striking down the Brillon ruling.

Maureen Dimino, indigent defense counsel for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said cases like Brillon's will become more common as cash-strapped states cut funding for public defender services, burdening those lawyers with so many cases that they seek more delays to prepare.

"This is going to become a bigger and bigger issue due to the economic crunch. The states are failing to fund these systems, causing these undue delays," she said.

==========

intresting . . . deenah/dinah/ishmael of the id card gig, the fudge bringer, with burlington, VT ties . . . hmmmm . . .. and brillon? the fdn doc in my presence said he's brilliant but not a genuis . . . and this man brillon . .. hmmmm . . .

so freaking sad . . .

boston.com (the note to myself "peter (the hebrew scholar) ward (the CA(org) priest. . . a paleontologist? hmmmm . . ."):

Dark green
A scientist argues that the natural world isn't benevolent and sustaining: it's bent on self-destruction
By Drake Bennett | January 11, 2009

WHEN WE LOOK at nature, it has become commonplace to see a fastidiously self-regulating system at work: wildebeest trim the savannah grasses, lions cull the wildebeest herds, and vultures clean the bones of both. Forests take in the carbon dioxide we exhale, use it to grow, and replace it with oxygen. The planet even has a thermostat, the carbon cycle, which relies on the interplay of volcanoes, rain, sunlight, plants, and plankton to keep the earth's temperature in a range congenial to life.

This idea of nature's harmonious balance has become not just the bedrock of environmental thought, but a driving force in policy and culture. It is the sentiment behind Henry David Thoreau's dictum, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." It lies behind last summer's animated blockbuster "Wall-E," in which a single surviving plant helps revive an earth smothered beneath the detritus of human overconsumption. It underlies environmental laws that try to minimize the damaging influence of humans on land and the atmosphere.

In this line of thought, the workings of the natural world, honed over billions of years of evolution, have reached a dynamic equilibrium far more elegant - and ultimately durable - than the clumsy attempts humankind makes to alter or improve them.

According to the paleontologist Peter Ward, however, nothing could be further from the truth. In his view, the earth's history makes clear that, left to run its course, life isn't naturally nourishing - it's poisonous. Rather than a supple system of checks and balances, he argues, the natural world is a doomsday device careening from one cataclysm to another. Long before humans came onto the scene, primitive life forms were busily trashing the planet, and on multiple occasions, Ward argues, they came close to rendering it lifeless. Around 3.7 billion years ago, they created a planet-girdling methane smog that threatened to extinguish every living thing; a little over a billion years later they pumped the atmosphere full of poison gas. (That gas, ironically, was oxygen, which later life forms adapted to use as fuel.)

The story of life on earth, in Ward's reckoning, is a long series of suicide attempts. Four of the five major mass extinctions since the rise of animals, Ward says, were caused not by meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, but by bacteria, and twice, he argues, the planet was transformed into a nearly total ball of ice thanks to the voracious appetites of plants. In other words, it's not just human beings, with our chemical spills, nuclear arsenals, and tailpipe emissions, who are a menace. The main threat to life is life itself.

"Life is toxic," Ward says. "It's life that's causing all the damn problems."

Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington and a scholar of the earth's great extinctions, calls his model the Medea Hypothesis, after the mythological Greek sorceress who killed her own children. The name makes clear Ward's ambition: To challenge and eventually replace the Gaia Hypothesis, the well-known 1970s scientific model that posits that every living thing on earth is part of a gargantuan, self-regulating super-organism.

Ward holds the Gaia Hypothesis, and the thinking behind it, responsible for encouraging a set of fairy-tale assumptions about the earth, and he'd like his new book, due out this spring, to help puncture them. He hopes not only to shake the philosophical underpinnings of environmentalism, but to reshape our understanding of our relationship with nature, and of life's ultimate sustainability on this planet and beyond.

Although Ward's ideas have yet to reach a broad audience, some scientists are welcoming his portrait of a constantly off-kilter earth as a corrective to the gauzier precepts that have cast their spells on environmental philosophy and policy. Others, however, describe his hypothesis as simply Gaia's dark twin, a model undermined by the same inclination to see one tendency as the whole story. Ward is open to the criticism that he's taken things too far; what's important, he believes, is weaning people from the idea that the earth works better without us. Even if Medea is an incomplete framework for viewing the natural world, it introduces a hardheadedness into environmental debates often driven by an unexamined idealism about Mother Nature.

Ward himself believes that the only help for the planet over the long run is management by human beings - whether that means actively adjusting the chemical composition of the atmosphere or using giant satellites to modify the amount of sunlight that reaches us. As Ward sees it, the planet doesn't need our help destroying itself. It will do that automatically. It needs us to save it.

. . .

For most of human history, it would have been alien to think of the planet as a "system" at all - the earth seemed an essentially infinite expanse of lands and seas that, depending on your theology, awaited human cultivation or demanded human deference. But with the Industrial Revolution it started to become clear that humans themselves were making changes with far-reaching, unintended, and destructive consequences, and over the 20th century an alternative understanding of the natural world began to take hold. This view saw the earth as a closed system with an inherent natural order, and pointed out the ways it broke down when we stressed it by pumping chemicals into the air or killing off animals that were vital links in food chains.

By the late 1970s, when the British scientist James Lovelock proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, something that once might have seemed like science fiction - the notion that all living things on the planet were linked like the cells in a single body - seemed like a persuasive model.

Lovelock was a serious scientist - a creation of his, the electron capture detector, was to prove instrumental in revealing the depletion of the ozone layer - and he had plenty of evidence for his theory. He pointed to the fact that, despite the wide variability of the sun's heat over the eons, microbes and plants have altered both the atmosphere and the ground to keep the temperature almost entirely within the narrow range in which terrestrial life thrives. For nearly as long, the amount of oxygen that plants and geological processes released into the atmosphere has remained at a point high enough to feed the metabolisms of quintillions of animals, but not so high that every forest was constantly going up in flames.

In the Gaian model, the world is maintained by an interlocking feedback system that puts a brake on drastic changes. Lovelock pointed to the role that plants play in the carbon cycle's planetary thermostat: When the planet warms, forests and phytoplankton suck carbon dioxide out of the air at a faster rate and create sheltering layers of clouds, both of which work to cool the planet. In a more familiar example from the animal kingdom, populations of predator and prey limit each other's sizes.

While the Gaia Hypothesis may be the most explicit version, the idea of a self-regulating, counterpoised planet has been central to the thinking of conservationists and environmentalists, and to the policies they have helped to shape. Removing dams, fighting the encroachment of alien plant and animal species, restoring the Everglades, reintroducing wolves into the American West, all are justified at least partly because they help restore a balance that man has disturbed.

As Ward sees it, however, this is almost exactly backward. Looking at the evidence of past extinctions - written in fossils and in the chemical makeup of deeply buried rock sediments - as well as the workings of today's oceans, atmosphere, and myriad food chains, he finds evidence of a planet that tends not toward harmony but toward extremes. Although windows of stability are possible, they are simply respites between catastrophic boom-and-bust cycles. He attributes one of the largest extinctions in history to the out-of-control proliferation of plankton feeding on upwellings of nutrients from the ocean floor. Rather than being elegantly brought back to equilibrium, the tiny organisms reproduced until they choked off much of the life in the upper ocean. Exhausting their newfound food supply, they died en masse, and decaying by the trillions used up all the oxygen in the water, killing off everything else.

As for the earth's temperature control, Ward, drawing on the writing of the environmental scientist James Kirchner, points out that more often than not the thermostat seems to be hooked up backward, with warming triggering more warming, and cooling more cooling. In a process we're seeing today, as the planetary temperature rises, warming increases the rate at which soil releases greenhouse gases - not only carbon dioxide, but methane and nitrous oxide. It leads to more forest growth in places that formerly were barren tundra, even as more carbon dioxide in the air makes plants hardier and better able to grow in areas once given over to desert. More plants in more places means a darker earth, and therefore a more heat-absorbent and warmer one. It's an escalating feedback loop that becomes even more powerful as the planet's white, ice-covered poles give way to darker open water.

The dangerous positive feedback can run the other way, too, Ward argues. He blames a planetary glut of plant life for the two prehistoric "snowball earth" episodes, 2.3 billion and 700 million years ago, when the planet froze from pole to pole. In a reverse greenhouse effect, the earth's plants, photosynthesizing madly, sucked so much carbon dioxide out of the air that temperatures plunged. Far from nurturing life, the world's plants nearly froze it to death.

. . .

Although Ward is a leading expert on the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction (the one, 65 million years ago, that killed off the last of the dinosaurs), his reputation in recent years has been as a writer of popular science books - his best known, "Rare Earth," is an argument against the likelihood of complex life being found elsewhere in the universe, coauthored in 2000 with the astronomer Donald Brownlee. Ward hopes the forthcoming book will find a wide readership, but also intends it as a serious theoretical framework for research into the interplay between living things and their environment.

So far, since Ward has not presented the Medea Hypothesis in papers or at conferences, it remains relatively unknown to environmental researchers and earth scientists. But among those familiar with it, there is a sense that its focus on nature's lethal erraticism could shape the debate, both in and out of academe, over the planet's long-term prospects.

"I think that it's a very valuable contribution to be focusing on the very serious destabilizing effects of life," says David Schwartzman, a professor at Howard University who reviewed a draft of Ward's book. Schwartzman's field, biogeochemistry, grew to prominence largely out of arguments over the Gaia Hypothesis. "There's no a priori reason to think that life's feedback with the environment necessarily is stabilizing."

"We do tend to think about everything being coordinated and helping each other," says Tyler Volk, an earth systems scientist at New York University and author of the book "CO2 Rising." "I basically agree with Ward that organisms can come along and create conditions that make it very difficult for a lot of other species."

But Schwartzman and Volk, among others, also caution that Medea may be as incomplete a model in its way as Gaia is. Since the late 1970s, even prominent Gaian thinkers such as Lovelock have moderated some of their stronger claims: They no longer describe the biosphere as a single organism, and they concede that not all the planet's feedback loops tend toward stability.

In fact, most earth scientists see no need to choose between Gaia and Medea: The earth, naturally, is a bit of both. "The natural world is an interestingly complex place," says Kirchner, director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research.

Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, is more dismissive. "Anybody who tells you [the feedbacks] are all positive or all negative is writing a potboiler," he says.

Other scientists take issue with Ward's reading of the prehistoric record, suggesting he may be blaming early life forms for catastrophes they did not cause. In the field of paleontology, some of the fiercest arguments of recent decades have been over what caused prehistory's great die-offs, and Ward has been in the middle of a few of those arguments. There's still significant debate, for example, over whether living things actually caused the Great Oxidation Event (and ensuing extinction) 2.5 billion years ago, and whether plants and other organisms can really be blamed for the "snowball earth" deep freezes and some of the more recent mass extinctions.

Ward cheerfully concedes that he may be proven at least partly wrong.

"I'm just erecting a series of hypotheses - some are going to turn out to be true," he predicts. "But there is nothing else to balance Gaia, there's nothing else for people to take a swat at. I welcome that. I have thick skin."

At the very least, Ward hopes to shape the image of the earth in the public imagination, and by extension in public policy. Beneath much environmental regulation lies the basically Gaian belief that, when faced with a brewing global problem like climate change, our best response should be to try as much as possible to take ourselves out of the equation, to reduce our carbon emissions to the point where we're no longer a factor in the feedback loops. Trying instead to manage something as hopelessly complex as the climate is seen as an act of Frankensteinian hubris.

Ward, however, argues that this way of seeing things only makes sense if one assumes that the earth will, once righted, inevitably return to the set of conditions most suitable for our continued survival. History, he argues, suggests it very well may not. Faced with a planet where life is almost guaranteed to wipe itself out - and take us with it - he is urging us to be active, and occasionally intrusive, guardians.

To combat climate change, Ward sees that role including engineering projects on a previously unimaginable scale, like cooling the atmosphere by seeding it with sulfuric acid or installing giant shields in space to deflect away sunlight. As the scientific consensus around climate change has spread and hardened, these so-called "geoengineering" projects have received more of a hearing, but most climate and earth scientists remain skeptical because of the enormous uncertainties about what their full effects would be.

Ironically, Lovelock himself has also, in the last few years, become an advocate for a geoengineering fix for climate change - specifically, an armada of vertical pipes placed in the oceans to bring colder, nutrient-rich water to the surface to absorb more carbon out of the air. But while Lovelock has described his proposal as an "emergency treatment" for a critically ill planet, Ward believes such schemes are going to have to become business as usual if we and our descendants are going to survive.

"The longevity of the biosphere can only be sustained through large-scale geoengineering," Ward argues. Without our firm hand, he believes, "the earth will go to hell in a handbasket," just as it has again and again in the past.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.
===========================

thecrimson.com:

THE NEWS IN BRIEF
Identity Finder Software Installed on Administrative Computers To Scan for Sensitive Information
Published On 1/11/2009 11:18:47 PM

By ELLEN X. YAN
Crimson Staff Writer

A software program called Identity Finder that scans for the presence of high risk information, such as social security numbers and credit card numbers, is currently being installed on most central administration computers, according to Robert Cahill, the University Information Systems director of support services.

According to guidelines released by Central Administration Information Technology, administrative computers must not store what they deem high-risk, confidential information “in any way relating to Harvard or Harvard sponsored activities on any individual user computer or portable storage device.”

The software is being installed “to make sure computers are compliant,” Cahill said. “All this software really does is allow you to know easily what is on your computer. This is a tool—a very non-intrusive tool, more of a scanning tool.”

Cahill said that the information would not be stored or reported in any way.

“It reports the information to the user,” he said. “It does not report to a server. We are simply allowing users to understand what is on their desktop.”

Noah S. Selsby ’94, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences client technology advisor, said the initiative currently affects only central administration and not the FAS or the College .

The software will be installed on all central administration computers in the “next couple of months,” Cahill said.

—Staff writer Ellen X. Yan can be reached at ellenyan@fas.harvard.edu.modip et nostrud digna aute minis nim
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again the comuter stuff . . . and cahill . . . and elln x yan . . . experiment lab live elecvrics neurobiolofgical . .

and recall - i was noting the HUF in the compures years aogo = find my ewntries in 2006 for infected harvard computeres back then - those that watch knoew all online throufg the HU system if they want - just like NSA now coming clean with its hypersurveillance of all . . .

and who watches? those controlling money streams . . .

nytimes.com:

January 12, 2009
Editorial
A Threat to McCain-Feingold
After the presidential election, the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit that could drive a stake through the heart of the campaign finance system. It challenges the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold law’s ban on “soft money” contributions. If the suit succeeds, it will seriously damage democracy by allowing a virtually unlimited amount of corporate and other special-interest money to flood into politics.

There is no denying that the campaign finance system is badly broken. It suffered even more harm when Barack Obama became the first major-party nominee to refuse public financing and the spending limits that come with it. One of Mr. Obama’s top priorities should be fixing the system’s flaws, including the core problem that it does not provide enough money for a strong presidential campaign in modern times. But it will be impossible to fix the system if the R.N.C. prevails in court.

The Republicans are trying to remove the restrictions that McCain-Feingold puts on contributions to national political parties. Now, the parties are allowed to accept no more than $28,500 a year from individuals, and nothing at all from corporations or labor unions. The R.N.C. wants to strip away these restrictions so it can accept unlimited amounts of “soft,” or unrestricted, money from corporations and rich people.

The suit, which is before a special three-judge panel in Washington, claims that the limits are unconstitutional. The R.N.C. says it uses much of the money it raises for activities not related to federal elections, such as redistricting, grass-roots organizing and issue advertising. It argues that the First Amendment prohibits limiting contributions for these purposes.

The problem with this argument is that the Supreme Court has already rejected it. In 2003, in McConnell v. F.E.C., the justices upheld the precise provisions the Republicans are now challenging.

In its ruling, the court emphasized that it does not matter what the money is spent on. Because the national parties have close ties to federal elected officials, the court said, large donations to the parties inject special-interest money into the federal government and have a corrupting effect on politics.

The McConnell decision should end the matter. But the R.N.C. seems to be hoping that because of changes in the court — in particular, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement by Samuel Alito — it can persuade the court to undo this recent and important precedent.

The Republican Party’s suit was clearly prompted by its troubles in the 2008 election, in which Mr. Obama proved far more adept at fund-raising than John McCain. It is disturbing that the R.N.C. sees its salvation in clearing the way for corporations and other special interests to flood its campaign coffers once again.

In its 2003 ruling, the Supreme Court declared that McCain-Feingold’s limits on soft money were a permissible means “to confine the ill effects of aggregated wealth on” national politics. The courts should reaffirm that well-reasoned decision — and Mr. Obama and Congress should get to work fixing the current badly flawed, out-of-date campaign finance system.

=========

as always:
It is best to read this journal from the beginning. . .
<http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2006/02/08/>
it makes more sense then. ....
or just explore the journal at: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/>
may i recommend: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/01/04/>
and a follow up to that: <http://theurbanhermit.livejournal.com/2008/10/12/>

and I do not know him and he does not know me - but it seems through Harvard our existences are intertwined; therefore, noting this is not an endorsement either way, but in the need to ask the readership of this journal to remain vigilent (as the bush leage asked of america but not for it's bad influence on america), I ask readers to keep abreast of www.whitehouse.gov and to help make sure Omaba and his harvard teams stays the course they claim to be on. . . for HUMFErs are in his ears as they are in mine - see previous entries. . .
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