The Pima Air & Space Museum offers exclusive bus tours of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center (AMARG), also known as the “Boneyard.” The facility is located adjacent to the Museum at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Seats are avaliable on a “first come first serve” basis.
See the photo at the bottom — when I lived and taught in Tucson, this was a constant source of fascination, and frankly, to us aviation fans, it still is.
The Boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona; the Pima Air & Space Museum now offers bus tours of the 309th Maintenance and Regeneration Group's collection of scrapped and very historic airplanes
Can’t soak all day.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
She’s being called Ida (EE-duh, to the Brits, EYE-duh to Bob Wills fans). How could you miss all the hype about her unveiling this week?
Science fans complain that the hype might be over done. Creationists appear a bit panicked by the developments.
Ida herself? She’s beautiful. Here’s an interview with Michael Novacek from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, carried on the public television news program World Focus.
Here’s a collection of British television stories on Ida, including David Attenborough’s animation of the reconstruction of her skeleton — some great graphics:
The summit is taking place about 500 miles from the Alaskan village of Newtok, where intensifying river flow and melting permafrost are forcing 320 residents to resettle on a higher site some 9 miles away in a new consequence of climate change, known as climigration.
Newtok is the first official Arctic casualty of climate change. A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study indicates 26 other Alaskan villages are in immediate danger, with an additional 60 considered under threat in the next decade, Cochran said.
Here’s how the warming denialists’ diary entries should run:
Of course, I read it too fast, and skipped over the word “visits.” I had to click on the story to see whether they were going to tell the prisoners to stay at home for a week, like the Fort Worth, Texas, school district did. I suppose, after a fashion, that was exactly the message.
At the Officer of the Receiver for California Prison Health Care Services, spokesman Luis Patino said Sunday that an inmate in Centinela State Prison in Imperial County was diagnosed as probable for the H1N1 virus, or swine flu.
“The inmate and his cellmate have been isolated, Patino said. “They remain at the prison.”
Maybe we’d be better off if the kids remained in school, as well as keeping the convicts in the prisons.
Is the panic over swine flu too much? If we go back to the week ending March 21, 2009, we find that there were already more than 22,000 cases of influenza in the U.S., with 35 pediatric deaths. Has the swine flu added to either the rates of infection or the rates of death? If the dramatic steps, the event cancellations and school closings, are appropriate for the swine flu, shouldn’t they have been appropriate for the other flu viruses, too?
Do we really need to close schools? What do you think — tell us in comments.
See the CDC’s report on swine flu at their site: H1N1 (Swine Flu)
THE rays are diffuse, but the specks of light are unmistakable. Share prices are up sharply. Even after slipping early this week, two-thirds of the 42 stockmarkets that The Economist tracks have risen in the past six weeks by more than 20%. Different economic indicators from different parts of the world have brightened. China’s economy is picking up. The slump in global manufacturing seems to be easing. Property markets in America and Britain are showing signs of life, as mortgage rates fall and homes become more affordable. Confidence is growing. A widely tracked index of investor sentiment in Germany has turned positive for the first time in almost two years.
* * * * * * * * *
But, welcome as it is, optimism contains two traps, one obvious, the other more subtle. The obvious trap is that confidence proves misplaced—that the glimmers of hope are misinterpreted as the beginnings of a strong recovery when all they really show is that the rate of decline is slowing. The subtler trap, particularly for politicians, is that confidence and better news create ruinous complacency. Optimism is one thing, but hubris that the world economy is returning to normal could hinder recovery and block policies to protect against a further plunge into the depths.
The cover almost says it all, doesn’t it? Week in and week out, The Economist has great covers, a phase of newsstand-oriented journalism that I hope never goes away, regardless the medium.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It was a reference to the “environmental movement” in government and politics — seniors take the class in Texas. “What does that mean?”
We have maybe ten minutes in the block to stray. No time for discovery learning to get this point across in government.
“The movement, the grass-roots political organizing to express concern for clean air, clean water, preservation of green space, preservation of endangered species, protection from toxic chemicals and poisons. Things really took off after Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. ”
“That’s a funny title. What’s it about?” I pause. It’s dangerous territory to ask what high school kids don’t know these days.
“Is there anyone here who does not know about DDT and its role in threatening our national symbol, the bald eagle?”
Every hand went up.
How can children get to their senior year and not know about Rachel Carson, DDT, or “environmentalism?”
Comes Frontline on PBS this week. Government and politics teachers, your students should watch and report.
This Week: “Poisoned Waters” (120 minutes),
April 21st at 9pm on PBS (Check local listings)
———————-
For years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith has reported from the corridors of power in Washington, on Wall Street, and overseas. But these days, he’s worried about something that he’s found much closer to home — something mysterious that’s appeared in waters that he knows well: frogs with six legs, male amphibians with ovaries, “dead zones” where nothing can live or grow.
What’s causing the trouble? Smith suspects the answers might lie close to home as well.
This Tuesday night, in a special two-hour FRONTLINE broadcast –“Poisoned Waters”– Smith takes a hard look at a new wave of pollution that’s imperiling the nation’s waterways, focusing on two of our most iconic: the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. He also examines three decades of environmental regulation that are failing to meet this new threat, and have yet to clean up the ongoing mess of PCBs, the staggering waste from factory farms, and the fall-out from unchecked suburban sprawl.
“The environment has slipped off our radar screen because it’s not a hot crisis like the financial meltdown, war, or terrorism,” Smith says. “But pollution is a ticking time bomb. It’s a chronic cancer that is slowly eating away the natural resources that are vital to our very lives.”
Among the most worrisome of the new contaminants are “endocrine disruptors,” chemical compounds found in common household products that mimic hormones in the human body and cause freakish mutations in frogs and amphibians.
“There are five million people being exposed to endocrine disruptors just in the Mid-Atlantic region,” a doctor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health tells Smith. “And yet we don’t know precisely how many of them are going to develop premature breast cancer, going to have problems with reproduction, going to have all kinds of congenital anomalies of the male genitalia that are happening at a broad low level so that they don’t raise the alarm in the general public.”
Can new models of “smart growth” and regulation reverse decades of damage? Are the most real and lasting changes likely to come from the top down, given an already overstretched Obama administration? Or will the greatest reasons for hope come from the bottom up, through the action of a growing number of grassroots groups trying to effect environmental change?
Join us for the broadcast this Tuesday night. Online, you can watch “Poisoned Waters” again, find out how safe your drinking water is, and learn how you can get involved.
Ken Dornstein
Senior Editor
————————
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation. Major funding for Poisoned Waters is provided by The Seattle Foundation, The Russell Family Foundation, The Wallace Genetic Foundation, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, The Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment, The Merrill Family Foundation, The Abell Foundation, The Bullitt Foundation, the Park Foundation, and The Rauch Foundation. Additional funding is provided by The Town Creek Foundation, The Clayton Baker Trust, The Lockhart Vaughan Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Chesapeake Bay Trust, Louisa and Robert Duemling, Robert and Phyllis Hennigson, Robert Lundeen, The Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, The Prince Charitable Trusts, Ron and Kathy McDowell, Valerie and Bill Anders, Bruce and Marty Coffey, The Foundation for Puget Sound, Janet Ketcham, Win Rhodes, The Robert C. and Nani S. Warren Foundation, Jim and Kathy Youngren, Vinton and Amelia Sommerville and Laura Lundgren.
————————
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of the WGBH Educational Foundation.
See a preview, and read more, here. Another preview below. You can watch the entire program online after April 21.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
1930s era typewriter that accompanied Australian journalist Ron Boland through his journalistic career, a Remington Portable - State Library of South Australia (on loan from Jasin Boland)
For nearly 50 years, this typewriter was the peak of technology, for a world class journalist.
Boland’s life and timeline could make for some interesting projects or study assignments — see Boland’s campaign for topless swimming on Australia’s beaches. Topless swimming for men.
Boland’s work is probably mostly invisible to American students, but it should provide some good enrichment for students of world history.
The case for Australian journalist Ron Boland's Remington Portable typewriter, testifying to the globe trotting done by the typewriter, and Boland. State Library of South Australia
Twain had a comment on recent actions at the Texas Education Agency:
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
– Following the Equator; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
The Nobel literature committees were slow; Twain did not win a Nobel in Literature; he died in 1910. Churchill did win a Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.
Both men were aficionados of good whiskey and good cigars. Both men suffered from depression in old age.
Both men made a living writing, early in their careers as newspaper correspondents. One waged wars of a kind the other campaigned against. Both were sustained by their hope for the human race, against overwhelming evidence that such hope was sadly misplaced.
Both endured fantastic failures that would have killed other people, and both rebounded.
Both men are worth study.
Twain, on prisons versus education: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.” – Speech, November 23, 1900
Churchill on the evil men and nations do:
“No One Would Do Such Things”
“So now the Admiralty wireless whispers through the ether to the tall masts of ships, and captains pace their decks absorbed in thought. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century. Or is it fire and murder leaping out of the darkness at our throats, torpedoes ripping the bellies of half-awakened ships, a sunrise on a vanished naval supremacy, and an island well-guarded hitherto, at last defenceless? No, it is nothing. No one would do such things. Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong. Such a mistake could only be made once—once for all.”
—1923, recalling the possibility of war between France and Germany after the Agadir Crisis of 1911, in The World Crisis,vol. 1, 1911-1914, pp. 48-49.
Missed this one. But contrary to what most of my journalism profs said, I think news is news so long as people don’t know it.
Walter Cronkite - undated photo via Mediabistro
Walter Cronkite turned 92 on election day, November 4.
Astounding. He’s still active in news, though heaven knows CBS doesn’t use him as they should (where was he on election night?).
I’ve been interested to see the prominence he gets, now, in history accounts of the Vietnam war. At the same time, it’s painful that we have students whose parents didn’t grow up with Cronkite on the air. They’re a generation removed from knowing what they missed.
My one brief Cronkite story: Late one afternoon I was preparing for a hearing at the Senate Labor Committee for the next morning, preparations that had been slowed by a fair deal of breaking news around Reagan’s Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, whose potential links to crime organizations had been hidden from the committee during his nomination hearings (Donovan was acquitted of wrongdoing in a later trial). Chaos might be the best way to describe the events, especially in the news area. A lot of misinformation was passed around, about what were the position and concerns of Labor Committee Chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch (my boss), what was the position of the White House, what was the evidence and what wasn’t the evidence on Donovan, etc.
I turned on the television to catch Cronkite’s broadcast. About five minutes in, the phone rang. It was Rita Braver, then a CBS producer, and she really gave me the third degree about some minor point on the Donovan story — a minor point, but one that had been reported incorrectly by others (I forget now what the issue was). I had known Braver, chiefly on the phone, for some time. I found her extremely careful with the facts, which was comfortable considering where she sat in CBS’s ranks; the stuff she worked on was on the evening news regularly. We talked for a few minutes, and then rather abruptly she yelled “Hang on!” and put me on hold. The newscast I was watching went to a commercial break, and as sometimes happened, the camera pulled away, and Cronkite on the air reached for the telephone on his desk. The commercial came on simultaneously with the voice on the phone: “This is Walter Cronkite. Mr. Darrell, I have a question about this report I’m holding. I think Rita has spoken with you about it.” We talked about the issue for just about a minute, he thanked me. As the show came out of the break, Cronkite read the news about Ray Donovan that day, with Hatch’s views. He got it right, of course.
Do most people realize how intensely most news operations work to get even the small stuff right?
It was really odd watching Cronkite reach for the phone, and then hear him on my phone.
Cronkite found time to go sailing on his birthday – recalling the old CBS joke that his boat was named “On Assignment.” Whenever Cronkite was away from the anchor desk, the substitutes explained he was “on assignment.”
If a lot of people screw up, where’s the shame? Right?
Powerline said, contrary to the facts:
Most people do not realize that the U.N.’s IPCC report was a political document, not a scientific one. As such, it explicitly refused to consider any of the recent scientific work on carbon dioxide and the earth’s climate. That work seems to show rather definitively that human activity has little to do with climate change, which has occurred constantly for millions of years.
Anyone who still had illusions that Powerline thinks about anything before they post it, or that they have any controls on accuracy or care for the facts, has had that illusion shattered. Of course, Powerline is a political organ, with not a whiff of science about it.
Rebates for high efficiency air conditioners (Well, this “APS” is Arizona Public Service, the power company for much of Arizona. But I thought climate change critics may not notice the difference, and high-efficiency air conditioners reduce carbon emissions.)
Even more, even sillier (NASA’s failure to mention greenhouse gases on Uranus is significant, why?)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Internet-fueled antagonists of global warming reports probably grow weary of the constant drizzle of reports and stories confirming the bare, consensus conclusion that rising temperatures, globally, are contributed to significantly by human-provided air pollution.
So, can you blame them when they trumpet that a major organization like the American Physical Society reverses its stand on global warming, and publishes a paper by a fellow usually considered a hoax and tinfoil hat favorite, Lord Monckton?
Well, yes, you can blame them. That’s not at all what happened. It turns out that a division of APS simply opened a discussion on global warming, and in doing that, they published Monckton’s piece for discussion.
With this issue of Physics & Society, we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, together with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion. This editor (JJM) invited several people to contribute articles that were either pro or con. Christopher Monckton responded with this issue’s article that argues against the correctness of the IPCC conclusion, and a pair from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, David Hafemeister and Peter Schwartz, responded with this issue’s article in favor of the IPCC conclusion. We, the editors of P&S, invite reasoned rebuttals from the authors as well as further contributions from the physics community. Please contact me (jjmarque@sbcglobal.net) if you wish to jump into this fray with comments or articles that are scientific in nature. However, we will not publish articles that are political or polemical in nature. Stick to the science! (JJM)
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.
1. GOOD LORD! GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS VANDALIZE APS.
Science is open. If better information becomes available scientists rewrite the textbooks with scarcely a backward glance. The Forum on Physics and Society of the APS exists to help us examine all the information on issues such as global climate change. There are physicists who think we don’t have warming right, I know one myself. It is therefore entirely appropriate for the Forum to conduct a debate on the pages of its newsletter. A couple of highly-respected physicists ably argued the warming side. Good start. However, on the denier’s side was Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who inherited his father’s peerage in 2006. Lord Monckton is not a scientist, his degree is in journalism and he’s a reporter for the Evening Standard, an English tabloid. Whatever it is that Viscounts do, he may do very well, but he doesn’t know squat about physics and his journalism suffers from it. Worse, somebody fed the media the line that Monckton’s rubbish meant the APS had changed its position on warming; of course it has not. Few media outlets took the story seriously.
How desperate are the anti-Gore-ites? They are desperate enough they’ll turn off their bovine excrement detectors, and claim Monckton’s goofy stuff is a new position for APS, without bothering to check the facts.
The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:
“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”
An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS. The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.” This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.
A serious case against the conclusions of human causation for global warming, by Pat Frank, published in Skeptic’s online site, “A Climate of Belief.” Dr. Frank is a careful and generally rigorous thinker, a physicist with no axes to grind against anyone involved, who has made a good case that we cannot conclude human causation; in discussions I’ve had with Dr. Frank, he’s limited his criticisms to the science. I’m more of an effects guy myself — but this is the one article that keeps me hoping for more, better evidence (while we make plans to reduce emissions, of course — whether warming is human caused or not, we need cleaner air).
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
If you’re interested in science research, check it out. Some of the posts are terribly technical — I don’t understand them, so I’ll have to get one of our sons to explain it to me — but you can catch the drift of what’s going on. Tommaso also offers a few photos of the Albuquerque area and Sandia Peak, worth the click alone.
It’s a good model of what some of us should do more of (yeah, this is self-flagellation).
Living through the Watergate scandals and the Constitutional crises they produced — and spending part of that time in Washington, D.C., working for the Senate — I got a wonderful view of how constitutional government works, why it is important that good people step up to make it work, and a glimpse of what happens when good people lay back and let the hooligans run amock.
Over the last three months it occurs to me that we may be living in a similar time, when great but latent threats to our Constitution and the rule of law may be halted or rolled back by one John Dean-like character who will stand up before a group of elected officials, swear to tell the truth, and then, in fact, tell the whole truth.
Teachers, are you taking advantages of these lessons in civics that come into our newspapers every day?
We live in interesting times, exciting times — we live in educational times.
You should be clipping news stories on these events, and you should be using them in your classrooms today, and saving them for the fall elections, for the January inauguration, for the new Congress . . . and for your future classes.
Regnery Publishing is today at least as inaccurate, if not as completely vitriolic, as any of the nasty newspapers published in the John Adams administration. Regnery is the publisher of Jonathan Wells’ mostly fictional, all incorrect account of biology, Icons of Evolution, for example.
I see from the index on Amazon that I get a mention. I hope Murray claims I caused one of those disasters. You can bet that if he says it, the opposite is true.
In the past couple of months I have had a couple of opportunities to spend some time in libraries and with databases. Checking out the citations from Steven Milloy’s “100 things” about DDT list, I discovered not a single citation relating to DDT’s effects on birds was correct; those articles that did exist concluded opposite what Milloy claims. Some of the articles simply didn’t exist. Bet Murray doesn’t question a single claim from Milloy.
And, did you know that DDT problems were common items for newspapers through the 1950s? You won’t learn that from Murray’s book.
Update, May 2: I have a copy of the book (Regnery did not provide it); it’s worse than I had imagined. Examples: The quote from this blog is criticized as being inaccurate; the quote describes Bush administration policies in 2004 and corporate actions in Uganda to discourage DDT spraying which continue. Murray’s rebuttal discusses Bush administration actions taken two years later, but fails to note that they have not yet worked.
Worse example: Murray has an entire chapter accusing “environmentalists” of being asleep at the switch for damages to fish and other wildlife due to birth control pill residues in the water; he fails to mention that DDT causes exactly the same problems. He fails to note that DDT and especially DDE are endocrine disruptors usually cited as culprits in these cases. He fails to note that the issues are at the top of the list of environmental organizations involved in fish, river conservation, and pesticide safety issues. Regnery’s name is rapidly becoming synonymous with”wildly inaccurate and politically skewed.”
Alas, that’s what I got from a skim of the book before this evening’s meetings.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The Order of the Arrow, the camping honor society within U.S. Boy Scouting, takes much of its Indian Heritage from a tribe of the Delaware group, the Lenni Lenape. The last speaker of the Lenni Lenape language died in Oklahoma a couple of years ago; it’s good to see more efforts to record the rest of the heritage before it, too, slips away.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 