The people who work to keep us driving

The recent tragedies in West Virginia coal mines (including two more men dead this week) and on the BP Oil Rig in the Gulf should remind us that there is a human cost to our relentless energy consumption that goes well beyond the ground war in the Middle East and the economic damage of pollution.

Lives are lost in giving us what we can't live without.We owe these people respect for risking their lives to keep us on the road and able to read in the dark.

It's not enough to say "they get paid well enough" when you look at the salaries. But do the math and figure in the hours these workers put in under dismal conditions. Witness the poor housing and family separations they endure, as described in the NYT article about North Dakota oil workers living in dilapidated RVs without sewers or water. They sacrifice to keep us from having to make any sacrifices.

These men and women who died digging coal and pumping oil are every bit as much involved of America's defense against terrorism as the military. They may not be on the battlefield or in as much danger as combat troops, but they are as important as the long supply chain which runs from Camp Pendelton to Kabul and Baghdad.

Who is your client?

For an excellent take on the ethics of Goldman Sachs' view of market-making, see the article in Wharton's free Knowledge newsletter:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2481

Protest or Pity-Party?

It is hard not to think that the tea party protestors want to use the power of the checkbook to starve government programs which benefit anyone but themselves. I don’t believe they only want to reign in government excess and debt.

They target as discretionary spending "benefits" paid to people not like them. Benefits paid to them -- Social Security, Medicare, the unlimited mortgage tax deduction, -- these are justified entitlements, not waste or pork or socialism. The other exception to any “financial controls” is Military Defense. They see themselves as so very threatened by the rest of the world, it seems as they don’t believe Reagan won the Cold War and defeated communism.

These 18 percent of Americans think they are entitled to more of a voice than others or they wouldn't be complaining that nobody is listening to them. They have comfortable middle class lives, yet they are angry about everything.

And then there are the gun lovers who say we can trust them not to kill us (if we behave), but we can’t trust anyone else not to try to kill us, all the time.

Richard Clark Non-fiction on Cyberwarfare

If you liked Clark's bestselling, reality-based thrillers, you'll want to read his new book warning about the Cyber attacks that have already been tested by countries like North Korea as well as all the ways both states and freelance terrorists can undermine every thing we use that touches a computer or the Internet (from banking to Air Defense Radar).

Terry Gross had a fascinating interview with Clark on "Fresh Air" today, if you want to know more.

In the good news department

The Economist reports success in growing forests around the world:

Slowing the losses
Some good news from the second differential

Apr 7th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

FOR the first time since the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) started making decade-by-decade surveys of the world’s forests, it says it has evidence that efforts to slow the world’s rate of deforestation are working. The total area of forest on the planet is about 4 billion hectares (10 billion acres). In the “key findings” of its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 (the full report is not out for a few months) the FAO estimates that, during each of the past ten years, an average of roughly 13m hectares of forest (an area twice the size of Latvia) were either converted to other uses or lost through natural causes such as drought and fire. In the 1990s the figure was 16m hectares.

Reduced rates of deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia form a large part of the story, but the reduction was more broadly based. It was seen on all continents apart from Oceania and forest-free Antarctica—and the increased loss of forest in Oceania was caused largely by drought and fire, rather than by extra logging.

go Butler!

If you're watching the Basketball NCAA Final tonight, I hope you'll be rooting for Butler. I have a personal reason -- beyond their miracle underdog status -- I taught Freshman English at UCLA with Butler University President, Bobby Fong.

Although we haven't kept in touch since grad school, I have always remembered him for his ethics as a teacher. At a time when tenure track jobs at universities required you to love theory and Derrida above all else, he chose, instead, to teach undergraduates at Berea College in Appalachia. When I saw the announcement of his becoming president of Butler a few years ago, I was not surprised to learn it was a school that valued "The Butler Way" of combining academics and athletics.

With stars who go to class on the day of a tournament game, and Butler's 90% graduation rate for all athletes, it certainly seems they are for real.