I like to read Volokh Conspiracy. I enjoy their intelligent and thoughtful commentary on (mostly) legal matters from a conservative/libertarian perspective. But not all participants are cut from the same cloth. Take for example this post by Jim Lindgren, wherein he criticizes Diane Francis for making a pretty stupid argument for population control:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Lindgren’s response?

A welfare state is in one sense a big Ponzi scheme. Without increasing numbers of people entering the scheme, there is no money to pay the people receiving the money. As Mark Steyn has repeatedly pointed out, you can’t run a welfare state without a growing population.

Francis, a visiting professor at Ryerson University, also blogs at the Huffington Post. BTW, Jim Geraghty reports that she has two children, which is one more than I have.

Huh? So…because Francis is (presumably) a liberal (because only liberals would argue for severe population control) her argument for severe population control is undermined because where would we get the new bodies to pay for the welfare state (which only liberals support)? Also, she’s a hypocrite. I mean, is that the argument? If you can tell you’re smarter than I am.

Filled with nonsequiter-ish snark, Lindgren misses a chance to gut Francis’ stupid argument:

…imagine you are a bit richer. You may have moved to a town, or your village may have grown. Schools, markets and factories are within reach. And suddenly, the incentives change. A tractor can gather the harvest better than children. Your wife may get a factory job—and now her lost wages must be set against the benefits of another baby. Education, thrift and a stake in the future become more important, and these middle-class virtues go hand in hand with smaller families. Education costs money, so you may not be able to afford a large family. Perhaps the state provides a pension and you no longer need children to look after you. And perhaps your wife is no longer willing to bear endless offspring. Higher living standards, better communications and more education enable you to rely on markets and public services, not just yourself and your family.

Macroeconomic research bears out this picture. Fertility starts to drop at an annual income per person of $1,000-2,000 and falls until it hits the replacement level at an income per head of $4,000-10,000 a year (see chart 2). This roughly tracks the passage from poverty to middle-income status and from an agrarian society to a modern one. Thereafter fertility continues at or below replacement until, for some, it turns up again (see article).

The link between living standards and fertility exists within countries, too. India’s poorest state, Bihar, has a fertility rate of 4; richer Tamil Nadu and Kerala have rates below 2. Shanghai has had a fertility rate of less than 1.7 since 1975; in Guizhou, China’s poorest province, the rate is 2.2. So strong is the link between wealth and fertility that the few countries where fertility is not falling are those torn apart by war, such as Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where living standards have not risen.

In other words, raising living standards is nearly as effective as a draconian family size restrictions. What conservative wouldn’t get behind an argument to make everyone richer, and let them have as many kids as they want (because they’ll want less kids)? You can even make the principled argument that the present debated measures to control greenhouse emissions would only slow this process, and result in degradation to the environment as a result of population overgrowth.

Or if you’re Jim Lindgren, you can use it to take a cheap shot at the left that doesn’t connect because it doesn’t make any sense. Which means that I’m apparently a better conservative blogger than Jim Lindgren.

President Obama announced his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, lead by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, help guide his efforts to rescue the economy and rebuild the shattered U.S. financial system. The team includes Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary who now heads the National Economic Council, Christina Romer who chairs the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The Obama administration also announce executive pay rules that would limit execs to taking no more than $500,000 if receiving federal bailout money after it was revealed that $18 billion had been spent on lavish bonuses.

The President also signed an executive order establishing the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, renaming the Bush administration’s faith-based programs office and also ordering that discriminatory practices of charities be looked into.

In addition to signing the SCHIP expansion into law, President Obama repealed a Bush executive order that restricted states from enrolling middle-income children until they proved that at least 95 percent of poor children eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP were in the program and the higher-income children had been without health insurance for one year.

President Obama also restored a Clinton administration order – revoked by President George W. Bush – backing the use of union labor for large-scale federal construction projects. This is the fourth pro-union executive order that Obama has signed since he’s been in office.

The Obama administration signaled it will seek more stringent controls from the EPA on mercury pollution from the nation’s power plants. The Justice Department on Friday submitted papers to the Supreme Court to dismiss the Bush administration‘s appeal of the rule, which a lower court struck down last year.

Lastly, after a few initial hiccups, Whitehouse.gov indicates that President Obama’s policy of posting legislation five days before being made law will be fully implemented soon.

While Barack Obama won’t be inaugurated until next Tuesday, Congress is already hard back at work (or, at least, back at work):

The House of Representatives passed two pay discrimination bills. The first, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, would reverse a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that a worker must file claims of wage discrimination within 180 days of the first decision to pay that worker less, even if the person was unaware of the pay disparity. The second, the Paycheck Fairness Act, would close loopholes that have enabled employers to evade the 1963 law requiring equal pay for equal work. Both were passed essentially on party lines, sadly but unsurprisingly. As long as these get through the Senate, they will of course be signed by the incoming president when he takes office.

Just earlier today, a Senate bill that would boost wildnerness protection across 2 million acres in nine states survived GOP stalling tactics. It should pass later this week.

Congress returned to business this week, passing an extension of unemployment benefits (thankfully, still-President Bush reversed his opposition) but punting a bailout of the auto industry until the Big 3 can demonstrate how the money would help.

Ever-masochistic, House Republicans elevated strong conservatives to leadership posts. Rep. Henry Waxman successfully toppled Rep. John Dingell as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, likely giving stronger voice to environmentalists just as the Senate prepares to introduce bills after Obama’s inauguration to combat global warming.

Because our focus has primarily been on the elections and all that entails, there are several items I’ve wanted to blog about but haven’t had time to. So here I’ll try to hit them all at once.

First, here’s an interesting piece from Newsweek on the “flexitarian“, which is sort of a hybrid between the vegetarian and the full-on meat eater. Given the unsustainability of factory farming and our meat-eating practices, any effort to reduct the amount of meat we eat is a good thing. And it has the benefit of reducing the suffering of animals consigned to factory farms. This should be the primary purpose in my opinion, but I realize that most Americans either don’t care or aren’t aware of how much suffering animals endure to produce cheap meat, dairy products and eggs. So despite the claim of a strident PETA official in the article that eating less meat is “beating one pig down the slaughter ramp instead of two” (as if the suffering of one less animal is something to be dismissed) I’m all for people simply doing the best they can to eat less meat. Change takes time.

Also, via Slashdot, Live Science has an article about a novel theory of the universe, that we live in a “cosmic bubble” that is simply one tiny part of an infinitely larger universe, a theory that provides an alternative explanation to dark matter for why our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. In short, our under-density part of the universe would warp space-time differently than the typically dense part of the universe we’re observing when we look at things like quasars that are billions of light years distant; that warp then provides the illusion that those objects are rushing away from us at fantastic speeds. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s any crazier than the universe being comprised mostly of matter we can neither see no detect (or can we?) but there you go.

Speaking of all things dark, Slashdot has another interesting post on Google’s efforts to make the “dark web” searchable. The dark web consist of things like PDF files and or scanned documents (like reports and academic papers) that now do not show up in search results. An even greater wealth of information may be at your fingertips soon.

PRI’s The World has a good series of radio articles called “How Wars End.” Amateur students of history such as myself, as well as the public at large, have acquired various myths about how wars in our history have ended. PRI, in interviews with historians, complicates our myths to some extent. There are several examples, but I found the one on the end of our civil war to be the most interesting. Most people presume that the war ended all at once that fateful day in April 1865 at Appomattox, and amateur historians like myself are aware that Lee turned down the idea of an insurgency that would drag the war on even longer. But the true story is a little more nuanced. It’s not that greater facts are uncovered; rather, it’s our understanding of the war’s end that should be modified. Though there was no unified insurgency during the occupation and reconstruction of the South, southerners certainly did resist occupation with force, committing acts of terror against emancipated blacks and attacking northern forces. Twelve years of political violence eventually sapped the will of northern politicians to continue occupying the south, but even then the violence did not end, as acts of terror were perpetrated against blacks all the way up until and through the civil rights era. Again, this picture doesn’t really present any new facts so much as it challenges our understanding of the end of the civil war, as well as the nature of insurgencies themselves. I recommend listening to the program in full.

Also, by now you’ve no doubt heard of the numerous instances of wrongly convicted men being freed in Dallas County by virtue of DNA testing. This is the direct result of Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins having launched an ambitious program to review hundreds of convictions to determine if men and women were wrongly convicted. However, not all District Attorneys and law enforcement agencies are as eager to expose or rectify their mistakes. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that will determine whether convicted criminals have a constitutional right to DNA testing that could prove their innocence. The Ninth Court of Appeals said they do; we’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say about that.

Also, the NY Times reported on Monday (feels like two weeks ago) that Afghan officials likely aided the Taliban in an attack on an American outpost in July that was very nearly overrun. This is yet another sign of the increasing nastiness of the war in Afghanistan, though it should hardly come as a surprise that some in the Afghan government (at the local level, or perhaps higher) have loyalties hostile to the Karzai government and our forces.

The Senate passed the Foreclosure Prevention Act by an 84-12 vote to help hurt homeowners, but given Democratic disappointment with the bill, it is likely to get a make-over in the House. The Senate also voted to back extension of wilderness protection areas.

The House voted to table the Bush-backed free trade agreement with Columbia that has faced much human rights criticism, and Speaker Pelosi is using it as leverage on getting a second economic stimulus package. The House also overwhelmingly approved expanding traumatic brain injury research.

Or at least less of it. The days of cheap and plentiful meat are coming to an end:

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

Obviously, that rate of consumption is unsustainable. There simply isn’t enough room in the world to grow all that meat, at least without devastating side effects on the environment and the world’s poor:

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops. The demand for ethanol is already pushing up prices, and explains, in part, the 40 percent rise last year in the food price index calculated by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

Mark Bittman also documents the deleterious side effects that excessive meat consumption has on us as well. To keep up with the high demand for cheap meat, factory farms raise animals in appalling conditions and drug them with hormone and antibiotics so that they’ll grow faster and live long enough to be killed for food. This of course is plainly cruel to the animals raised in such conditions, but it isn’t good for us other. And factory farmers have every incentive to get sick and dying animals into the food chain, as this article demonstrates:

Video footage being released today shows workers at a California slaughterhouse delivering repeated electric shocks to cows too sick or weak to stand on their own; drivers using forklifts to roll the “downer” cows on the ground in efforts to get them to stand up for inspection; and even a veterinary version of waterboarding in which high-intensity water sprays are shot up animals’ noses — all violations of state and federal laws designed to prevent animal cruelty and to keep unhealthy animals, such as those with mad cow disease, out of the food supply.

One reason that regulations call for keeping downers — cows that cannot stand up — out of the food supply is that they may harbor bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. It is caused by a virus-like infectious particle that can cause a fatal brain disease in people.

Another is because such animals have, in many cases, been wallowing in feces, posing added risks of E. coli and salmonella contamination.

Yes we have plenty of laws on the books banning these sorts of cruel, inhumane, dangerous and short-sighted practices. But if you think these practices are isolated, think again (read Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” or Matthew Scully’s “Dominion” if you want to know what really goes on in these places.)This goes on all the time because the Agriculture Department doesn’t have the regulations or practices in place to stop it, and because the profit motive of factory farmers encourages them to push dying animals into the food supply, even if they happen to be dying of mad cow disease.

But this system is simply unsustainable. Animals raised for food eat food that many of the world’s people desperately need to eat, they compete with us for space, they damage the environment, and our practice of raising them in horrendous conditions is cruel to them and damaging to our public health. Bittman also describes the various alternatives available, including raising animals in more humane and less restricted conditions. Though most Americans will not be willing to consider a change in what’s on the dinner table based on environmental impact and cruelty alone, we may all find ourselves priced out of cheap meat whether we’re ready to change or not. And that can’t happen soon enough.

UPDATE: The USDA has suspended Westland’s contracts with the government while they investigate, but if you wish to encourage a most robust investigation, visit the Humane Society’s website to send an email to the USDA. Westland Meat Co., the owners of the meat packing plant where these acts took place, has replaced their website with a statement about the video and a pledge to clean up their operations. But if you’d like to send them an email, this address should do: info@westlandmeat.com. Or their phone/fax is available here.

Here’s an interesting article in today’s NY Times about the dilemma faced by conservationists in the face of global warming. Giving the changes likely to ensue in the world’s climate, what should they be trying to preserve?

…everywhere, ecologists and conservation biologists wonder how landscapes already under preservation will change with the climate.

“We have over a 100-year investment nationally in a large suite of protected areas that may no longer protect the target ecosystems for which they were formed,” said Healy Hamilton, director of the California Academy of Sciences, who attended a workshop on the subject in November in Berkeley, Calif. “New species will move in, and the target species will move out.”

As a result, more and more conservationists believe they must do more than identify biologically important landscapes and raise money to protect them. They must peer into an uncertain future, guess which sites will be important 50 or 100 years from now, and then try to balance these guesses against the pressing needs of the present.

The dilemma being that there’s no use in going to great lengths to preserve streams that will be to warm for the salmon their being preserved for, or preserving wetlands that may be in underwater in a few decades. It’s impossible to know what the future entails, but though I believe firmly that global warming is happening and that we’re contributing to it, I also know that predictions for the future are often gloomier than they should be. I would lean towards preservation on the assumption that certain landscapes and ecologies will continue to exist in the future. But then I’m not in the position these conservationists are, in trying to guess the future with what is at best incomplete information.

This is just astounding:

In one of the few places on Earth where people can rarely be found, the human race has well and truly made its mark. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean lies a floating garbage patch twice the size of Britain. A place where the water is filled with six times as much plastic as plankton. This plastic-plankton soup is entering the food chain and heading for your dinner table.

Who would have believed it?

George Packer looks at the imminent extinction of the world’s primates and sees tragedy:

The passing from the world of our closest relatives is not a political tragedy, like Burma; it is not a humanitarian nightmare, like Darfur; it is not an ideological disaster, like Iraq. All the same, it makes me unspeakably sad. How lonely to inhabit the planet without that familiar and alien gaze to keep us company. The fact that magnificent, uncomprehending, essentially helpless animals have to pay the ultimate price for our indifference seems at times like a worse crime than anything human beings do to one another. Our belated awakening to the distant prospect of collective suicide known as global warming might be the last chance to prevent the more imminent crime of kin-killing.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We just have to summon the will to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of our cousins, whose only failing is to not be as powerful, cruel and selfish as we are.