“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Paul Krugman: The War on Logic

My wife and I were thinking of going out for an inexpensive dinner tonight. But John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says that no matter how cheap the meal may seem, it will cost thousands of dollars once you take our monthly mortgage payments into account.

Wait a minute, you may say. How can our mortgage payments be a cost of going out to eat, when we’ll have to make the same payments even if we stay home? But Mr. Boehner is adamant: our mortgage is part of the cost of our meal, and to say otherwise is just a budget gimmick. . . . . .

We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics. Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic.  

E. J. Dionne Jr.: GOP test: A civil and honest health-care discussion

President Obama’s call for “a more civil and honest public discourse” will get its first test much sooner than we expected.

Having properly postponed all legislative action last week out of respect for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of the Tucson shootings, the House Republican leadership decided it could abide no further delay in a vote on its “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” And so, as a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor explained, “thoughtful consideration of the health care bill” is slated for this week.

It’s disappointing that the House did not wait a bit longer before bringing up an issue that has aroused so much division, acrimony and disinformation. After all, the repeal bill has no chance of becoming law. The president would certainly veto it, and the Democratic-led Senate is unlikely to pass it.

Moreover, it was the acidic tone of the original health-care debate that led Giffords, in her widely discussed interview last March, to suggest that we “stand back when things get too fired up and say, ‘Whoa, let’s take a step back here.’ ”

Robert Kuttner: Consolation and Inspiration From Dr. King

On this, the commemoration of the 82nd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth, we can take some solace from what Dr. King did in the face of forces far more annihilating than the ones that progressives face this cold January.

Impossibly enough, he built a movement.

He did so in an era when the consequences for challenging the racial order in the American South were swift and brutal. You lost your economic livelihood, or your life.

In 1955, when Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott, the chances of such a movement seizing the nation’s conscience, and within less than a decade including the full moral authority of an American president, were just about inconceivable. He was a minor 26-year-old radical, hardly known outside his own circle.

In 1955, except for a recent Supreme Court decision on school segregation widely held to be unenforceable, there was no support from the government to end the racial order in the South. The Democratic Party was fatally dependent on the votes of Southern racists. The Republican Party of Lincoln was failing to lead even on something as rudimentary as a federal anti-lynching law.

Coleen Rowley: We’re conflating proper dissent and terrorism

It’s both misguided and distracting to direct our homeland security efforts against protesters.

A secretive, unaccountable, post-9/11 homeland security apparatus has increasingly turned inward on American citizens.

The evidence includes everything from controversial airport body scanners to the FBI’s raids last September on antiwar activists’ homes in Minneapolis and Chicago. A federal grand jury investigation in Chicago was recently expanded.

Unless the erosion of proper legal safeguards is halted, we risk a return to Vietnam-era abuses on the part of the FBI and other security agencies.

Agents are now given a green light, for instance, to check off “statistical achievements” by sending well-paid, manipulative informants into mosques and peace groups.

Dean Baker The ‘new normal’ of unemployment

Mainstream economists are preaching a decade of pain and historically high joblessness – as if no alternative policy existed

The American Economics Association held its annual meeting in Denver last weekend. Most attendees appeared to be in a very forgiving mood. While the economists in Denver recognised the severity of the economic slump hitting the United States and much of the world, there were few who seemed to view this as a serious failure of the economics profession.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of economists in policy positions failed to see the signs of this disaster coming, and supported the policies that brought it on, did not seem to be a major concern for most of the economists at the convention. Instead, they seemed more intent on finding ways in which they could get ordinary workers to accept lower pay and reduced public benefits in the years ahead. This would lead to better outcomes in their models. . . . . .

If economists did their job, they would be pushing policies to get the economy quickly back to full employment. Instead, they just repeat lines about how “we” will just have to accept some rough times. Unfortunately, no one ever asks the economists who preach austerity how much time they expect to spend in the unemployment lines.

If they don’t know anything, then why should we listen to them?

Michelle Chen: Economic Recovery? Not So Much for Women

The latest employment figures place the economic “recovery” firmly on the Y chromosome. According to the National Women’s Law Center, the unemployment crisis declined for men in 2010-but grew for women.

From January to December 2010, federal data shows that unemployment among women ticked up from 7.8 percent to 8.1 percent, while the rate for men dipped from 10 percent to 9.4 percent. All those figures are, of course, pretty dismal, and overall unemployment during the recession has been proportionally higher for men.

Still, the divergent employment trends in 2010 indicate that the  recovery period will fail to address or even widen gender gaps in economic opportunity. The recovery certainly looks different from the bottom end, as the NWLC reports

Monday Business Edition

I can of course only speculate (unless you want to give me some), but returning to the theme of last week’s Gold diaries, including 2 by Translator– Popular Culture and Pique the question always is can you eat it?

Gold is easily digestible, since it is non reactive, but it has no nutritional value.  It’s eating dirt, like the Haitians.

Oil is more dirt eating, only it goes up in the air to kill us and is quickly disappearing.  A real economist would expect the value of Gold v. Oil to decline due to supply and demand, but what do I know?

The real utility of Money is not as a store of value, but as a medium of exchange.  By turning over the ability to create money to private enterprises with little regulation through leverage we’ve encouraged a series of financial inflations in the speculative value of assets that will never be realized in a free market.

Even the most Randian will admit there will be winners and losers, their problem is that compared to their exposure to loss there is literally not enough money in the world to cover their bets.

Eventually it’s this shadow economy that’s going to have to take a hair cut and a devaluation.

Why?

Because that’s where the money is.

If you are leveraging 30 : 1 (that is, betting 30 for every 1 you actually have) where is the bigger number?

Business News below.

1 Europe divided over expanding euro crisis fund

by Laurent Thomet, AFP

1 hr 21 mins ago

2 Europe meets under pressure to boost crisis fund

by Laurent Thomet, AFP

Sat Jan 15, 10:26 pm ET

3 Russia’s Vimpelcom backs new Egypt telecoms deal

by Dmitry Zaks, AFP

25 mins ago

4 Euro leaps to one-month dollar high

AFP

30 mins ago

5 Indonesia carrier Garuda talks up IPO

by Stephen Coates, AFP

Sun Jan 16, 1:51 am ET

6 Russian firm builds web empire at home and abroad

by Stuart Williams, AFP

Sun Jan 16, 6:43 pm ET

7 BP embarks upon Russian Arctic energy exploration deal

by Roland Jackson, AFP

Sat Jan 15, 3:19 pm ET

8 Turkmenistan says ready for energy partnership with EU

by Anton Lomov, AFP

Sat Jan 15, 4:24 pm ET

9 Fiat Mirafiori staff approve tough new deal

AFP

Sat Jan 15, 7:06 am ET

10 Euro slips before euro zone meet

By Jessica Mortimer, Reuters

4 mins ago

11 Euro zone finance ministers to discuss changes to rescue fund

By Jan Strupczewski and Ilona Wissenbach, Reuters

41 mins ago

12 Wait for complete package on debt crisis: Merkel

By Andreas Rinke, Reuters

Sat Jan 15, 10:24 am ET

13 Dampening the U.S.-China fireworks

By Emily Kaiser, Reuters

Sun Jan 16, 4:03 pm ET

14 China’s Hu upbeat, resists U.S. pressure on yuan

By Susan Cornwell, Reuters

Mon Jan 17, 2:19 am ET

15 Investors crave more strong bank results

By Caroline Valetkevitch, Reuters

Sun Jan 16, 10:44 am ET

16 Caution sets in after BP-Rosneft deal

By Tom Bergin, Reuters

1 hr 57 mins ago

17 BP and Russia’s Rosneft in share swap, Arctic pact

By Tom Bergin, Reuters

Sat Jan 15, 10:28 am ET

18 10,000th sale lifts Airbus past Boeing in 2010

By Tim Hepher, Reuters

1 hr 34 mins ago

19 AIG recapitalization deal closes, share sale looms

By Ben Berkowitz and Clare Baldwin

Fri Jan 14, 6:25 pm ET

20 Retail sales rise modestly, core prices tame

By Mark Felsenthal, Reuters

Fri Jan 14, 4:32 pm ET

21 Intel’s market sway wanes as it bucks S&P gains

By Ryan Vlastelica and Chuck Mikolajczak, Reuters

Fri Jan 14, 4:09 pm ET

22 European ministers to spar over bailout fund

By GABRIELE STEINHAUSER, AP Business Writer

1 hr 18 mins ago

23 US, China clash on energy, environment

By JOE McDONALD, AP Business Writer

2 hrs 26 mins ago

24 Euro slips as EU discusses bailout strategy

By COLLEEN BARRY, AP Business Writer

42 mins ago

25 US pomp meant to improve tone of China relations

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 8:24 pm ET

26 Why supermarket stocks are getting squeezed

By DAVID K. RANDALL, AP Business Writer

Sun Jan 16, 3:59 pm ET

27 Federal government spends millions on hoop houses

By STEVE KARNOWSKI, Associated Press

Mon Jan 17, 3:08 am ET

28 Irish premier won’t quit over Ireland debt crisis

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 4:29 pm ET

29 Camden, NJ braces for deep police, fire cuts

By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 4:21 pm ET

30 Cancer survivor aims to raze barriers with app

By MARCUS WOHLSEN, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 4:54 pm ET

31 Question looms on WTC health act: Who is covered?

By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 4:08 pm ET

32 Drama of Northeast fishing industry seen in movie

By JAY LINDSAY, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 4:12 pm ET

33 Record $14 trillion-plus debt weighs on Congress

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 1:50 am ET

34 US automakers draw big crowds at Detroit auto show

By COREY WILLIAMS, Associated Press

Sat Jan 15, 7:31 pm ET

35 Workers at Turin plant say yes to Fiat

By FRANCES D’EMILIO, Associated Press

Sat Jan 15, 9:06 am ET

36 Year ahead looms as toughest yet for state budgets

By JUDY LIN and SHANNON McCAFFREY, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 3:00 am ET

37 Gunbattles, food shortages temper Tunisians’ joy

By ELAINE GANLEY and BOUAZZA BEN BOUAZZA, Associated Press

Sun Jan 16, 5:26 pm ET

38 Plan set to end government involvement in AIG

By PALLAVI GOGOI, AP Business Writer

Fri Jan 14, 7:10 pm ET

39 Federal judges consider high school sports case

By MICHAEL TARM, Associated Press

Fri Jan 14, 8:04 pm ET

40 Holiday spending "record" not as good as it looks

By ELLEN GIBSON, AP Retail Writer

Fri Jan 14, 3:27 pm ET

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 17 is the 17th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 348 days remaining until the end of the year (349 in leap years).

On this day in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his farewell address to the nation warning the American people to keep a careful eye on what he calls the “military-industrial complex” that has developed in the post-World War II years.

A fiscal conservative, Eisenhower had been concerned about the growing size and cost of the American defense establishment since he became president in 1953. In his last presidential address to the American people, he expressed those concerns in terms that frankly shocked some of his listeners.

Eisenhower began by describing the changing nature of the American defense establishment since World War II. No longer could the U.S. afford the “emergency improvisation” that characterized its preparations for war against Germany and Japan. Instead, the United States was “compelled to create a permanent armaments industry” and a huge military force. He admitted that the Cold War made clear the “imperative need for this development,” but he was gravely concerned about “the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” In particular, he asked the American people to guard against the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Military-industrial complex (MIC) is a concept commonly used to refer to policy relationships between governments, national armed forces, and the industrial sector that supports them. These relationships include political approval for research, development, production, use, and support for military training, weapons, equipment, and facilities within the national defense and security policy. It is a type of iron triangle.

The term is most often played in reference to the military of the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address speech of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure.

It is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as institutions of the defense contractors, The Pentagon, and the Congress and executive branch. This sector is intrinsically prone to principal-agent problem, moral hazard, and rent seeking. Cases of political corruption have also surfaced with regularity.

A similar thesis was originally expressed by Daniel Guerin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business, about the fascist government support to heavy industry. It can be defined as, “an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs”.

 38 BC – Octavian marries Livia Drusilla.

1287 – King Alfonso III of Aragon invades Minorca.

1377 – Pope Gregory XI moves the Papacy back to Rome from Avignon.

1524 – Giovanni da Verrazzano sets sail westward from Madeira to find a sea route to the Pacific Ocean.

1562 – France recognizes the Huguenots under the Edict of Saint-Germain.

1595 – Henry IV of France declares war on Spain.

1608 – Emperor Susenyos of Ethiopia surprises an Oromo army at Ebenat; his army reportedly kills 12,000 Oromo at the cost of 400 men.

1648 – England’s Long Parliament passes the Vote of No Addresses, breaking off negotiations with King Charles I and thereby setting the scene for the second phase of the English Civil War.

1773 – Captain James Cook and his crew become the first Europeans to sail below the Antarctic Circle.

1781 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Cowpens – Continental troops under Brigadier General Daniel Morgan defeat British forces under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton at the battle in South Carolina.

1799 – Maltese patriot Dun Mikiel Xerri, along with a number of other patriots, is executed.

1811 – Mexican War of Independence: In the Battle of Calderon Bridge, a heavily outnumbered Spanish force of 6,000 troops defeats nearly 100,000 Mexican revolutionists.

1852 – The United Kingdom recognizes the independence of the Boer colonies of the Transvaal.

1873 – A group of Modoc warriors defeat the United States Army in the First Battle of the Stronghold, a part of the Modoc War.

1885 – A British force defeats a large Dervish army at the Battle of Abu Klea in the Sudan.

1893 – The Citizen’s Committee of Public Safety, led by Lorrin A. Thurston, overthrows the government of Queen Liliuokalani of the Kingdom of Hawaii.

1899 – The United States takes possession of Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean.

1904 – Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard receives its premiere performance at the Moscow Art Theatre.

1912 – Sir Robert Falcon Scott reaches the South Pole, one month after Roald Amundsen.

1913 – Raymond Poincare is elected President of France.

1917 – The United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands.

1929 – Popeye the Sailor Man, a cartoon character created by Elzie Segar, first appears in the Thimble Theatre comic strip.

1929 – Inayatullah Khan, king of the Emirate of Afghanistan abdicates the throne after only three days into his reign.

1941 – Franco-Thai War: French forces inflict a decisive victory over the Royal Thai Navy.

1945 – Soviet forces capture the almost completely destroyed Polish city of Warsaw.

1945 – The Nazis begin the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp as Soviet forces close in.

1945 – Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was taken into Soviet custody while in Hungary; he is never publicly seen again.

1946 – The UN Security Council holds its first session.

1949 – The Goldbergs, the first sitcom on American television, first airs.

1950 – The Great Brinks Robbery – 11 thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car Company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts.

1961 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the “military-industrial complex”.

1961 – Former Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba is murdered in circumstances suggesting the support and complicity of the governments of Belgium and the United States.

1966 – A B-52 bomber collides with a KC-135 Stratotanker over Spain, dropping three 70-kiloton nuclear bombs near the town of Palomares and another one into the sea in the Palomares incident.

1969 – Black Panther Party members Bunchy Carter and John Huggins are slain during a meeting in Campbell Hall on the campus of UCLA.

1977 – Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States.

1981 – President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos lifts martial law eight years and five months after declaring it.

1982 – “Cold Sunday” – in the United States temperatures fell to their lowest levels in over 100 years in numerous cities.

1983 – The tallest department store in the world, Hudson’s, flagship store in downtown Detroit closes due to high cost of operating.

1989 – Stockton massacre: Patrick Purdy opens fire with an assault rifle at the Cleveland Elementary School playground, killing five children and wounding 29 others and one teacher before taking his own life.

1991 – Gulf War: Operation Desert Storm begins early in the morning. Iraq fires 8 Scud missiles into Israel in an unsuccessful bid to provoke Israeli retaliation.

1991 – Harald V becomes King of Norway on the death of his father, Olav V.

1992 – During a visit to South Korea, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologizes for forcing Korean women into sexual slavery (Comfort women) during World War II.

1994 – 1994 Northridge Earthquake: A magnitude 6.7 earthquake hits Northridge, California.

1995 – The Great Hanshin earthquake: A magnitude 7.3 earthquake hits near Kobe, Japan, causing extensive property damage and killing 6,434 people.

1996 – The Czech Republic applies for membership of the European Union.

1997 – A Delta 2 carrying a GPS2R satellite explodes 13 seconds after launch, dropping 250 tons of burning rocket remains around the launch pad.

1998 – Lewinsky scandal: Matt Drudge breaks the story of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair on his website The Drudge Report.

2001 – President Bill Clinton posthumously raises Meriwether Lewis’ rank from Lieutenant to Captain.

2002 – Mount Nyiragongo erupts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, displacing an estimated 400,000 people.

2007 – The Doomsday Clock is set to five minutes to midnight in response to North Korea nuclear testing.

2008 – British Airways Flight 38 crash lands just short of London Heathrow Airport in England with no fatalities. It is the first airline accident that resulted in a Boeing 777 hull loss.

2010 – Rioting begins between Muslim and Christian groups in Jos, Nigeria, which resulting in at least 200 deaths.

Holidays and observances

   * Christian Feast Day:

         o Anthony the Great (Roman Catholic and Eastern (Byzantine) Catholic Church)

         o Blessed Amelbert

         o Mildgytha

         o Sulpitius the Pious

         o January 17 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)

   * The opening ceremony of Patras Carnival, celebrated until Clean Monday. (Patras)

It’s OK You Can Tell Me I’m Hu Jintao! Really      



China Leader’s Limits Come Into Focus as U.S. Visit Nears

With President Hu Jintao at the helm, China has become a $5 trillion industrial colossus, a growing military force, and, it sometimes appears, a model of authoritarian decisiveness, navigating out of the global financial crisis and sealing its position as the world’s fastest rising power.

But as Mr. Hu prepares to visit Washington this week in an attempt to defuse tensions with the United States, Obama administration officials are grappling with what they describe as a more complex reality.

Let Us Help Will’ll Make Sure Your Country Remains Poor  

 

Poor countries with IMF loans ‘divert aid from public health’

Poor countries that borrow from the International Monetary Fund are spending just one cent in every dollar received in health aid on improving the medical care of their populations, according to new Oxford University-led research.

The study, published in the International Journal of Health Services, said there were signs that the tough loan conditions imposed by the IMF were leading to health aid being diverted for other uses.

In an investigation of more than 100 low and middle-income countries, the report sought to explain why increased aid spending had left many countries well off track to hit the United Nations millennium development goals (MDGs) for health, which include a two-thirds reduction in infant mortality and a three-quarter decline in maternal mortality.

Being Right Doesn’t Mean Anyone Will Listen



Ike was right all along: The danger of the military-industrial complex

If you doubt, half a century on, that Dwight Eisenhower had it right, then consider the advertisements on WTOP, the Washington region’s all-news radio station. Every big metro area in the US has one, where car dealerships tout their bargains, and fast food chains promote a new special offer.

WTOP has all that. But it boasts other advertisers too, with names such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Revolution Is Followed By The Reallity Of The Aftermath



The brutal truth about Tunisia

The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents – another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria – because Tunisia wasn’t meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh – exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.

Challenging The Mullahs On Human Rights

 

Jailed for 11 years for challenging state abuses

In the first of a monthly series to mark the 50th birthday of Amnesty International, a profile of human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who is at present incarcerated in an Iranian jail

NASRIN SOTOUDEH is one of Iran’s best-known human rights lawyers. Her past clients include juvenile offenders facing the death penalty, victims of domestic violence and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. She also defended men and women whose only crime was to participate in peaceful protests following the disputed Iranian presidential election in 2009.

The Iranian government is determined to silence all opposition. Detainees have been held incommunicado for days, weeks or even months while relatives are unable to find out where they are being held, or on what charges.

The Torturer Of Haiti Returns How Unlucky For Them    



‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier returns to tense Haiti

Reporting from Port-au-Price, Haiti – Jean-Claude Duvalier, the once-reviled dictator of Haiti known as Baby Doc, made a surprise return to this country Sunday evening, ending almost a quarter-century of exile and sending out shockwaves of speculation over his motives and intentions.

He arrives at a critical moment for a country still struggling to recover from last year’s catastrophic earthquake, and now locked in a political crisis that has left it unable to elect a new president.

This is the companion piece to the one about gold from Friday night in Popular Culture.  Obviously, we intend to get geekier tonight than we did Friday.  Then we talked about gold being used primarily as money or other symbols of wealth.

Tonight we will discuss how gold is mined and purified, and the actual industrial uses for it as opposed to jewelry and investment purposes.  The old picture that most folks have about the forty-niner with his gold pan is far from how gold is mined, and was not really very accurate even then, being mostly a product of Hollywood.

To mine gold, first you have to find it.  This is sort of like the old recipe for rabbit pie that started, “first you catch the rabbit.”  Gold is actually pretty widespread, but useful ores are not all that common.  It would be useful to look at mining gold in a chronological progression.

Up until comparatively recent times, almost all gold was found in placer deposits, that is, concentrations of metallic gold in the bends of rivers and streams where eddies slowed the rushing water, allowing the much heavier gold to settle.  Sometimes decent sized nuggets could be found, but lots of the gold was pretty fine, the so-called gold dust.  To separate the gold from the other heavy minerals, people took advantage of the fact that gold is over twice as dense as even the densest common minerals.  This was done hydraulically, the gold bearing sand being placed on sluice boxes and flooded with water.  A sluice box is long tray with sides that has riffles on the bottom.  The riffles are simply raised portions so that a series of ridges were formed on the bottom of the box.  The sand was put at the top and water was run down it (the box is tilted at an angle so that the water will run out the bottom).  The water picks up the sand (and some of the gold) and washes it down the box.  The heavier gold gets caught in the riffles as the sand runs out the bottom.

Gold panning operates on the same principle, but on a much smaller scale.  Some of the sluice boxes were many meters long and a meter or more wide, while a pan has to be small enough to hold.  Panning was and is used mostly as a prospecting tool rather than a production tool.  In the old days the prospectors would use to pan to find promising gold deposits, then build sluices to do the actual bulk separation.  To get enough gold to be profitable from panning alone would require extremely rich deposits, although in a few places a meagre living could be made that way.

The old timers would use copper pans and rub mercury on the bottom of them.  The mercury forms an alloy with the copper (alloys of mercury are called amalgams) and becomes solid.  Mercury also forms an amalgam with gold, so a mercury coated pan was effective at trapping the very fine dust particles that otherwise might be lost.  Around the campfire at night, they would put the pan in the coals after they had separated out all of the bigger gold and distill off the mercury, leaving a little gold button in the pan.  This may be why legend has it that the old timers were not quite right, if you know what I mean.  They were exposing themselves to mercury vapor on a regular basis, and of course mercury is a potent nerve toxin (I wrote about mercury a few weeks ago).  I also suspect the the cheap whiskey might have also contributed to their problems.

Hydraulic concentration is still used today, with modern refinements for certain ores, but other ores are better concentrated using a floatation process where chemical compounds are added to water to make a froth when air is blown in from the bottom of the container.  The chemicals are chosen so the froth preferentially binds to the gold containing minerals, so that they float to the top and are skimmed off of the container.

In any event, in the old days hydraulic concentration was the only game in town.  Much of the gold was lost, since the particles were so fine that the operators could not see them.  At times mercury was reverted to to try to get the really fine particles, but that involved a considerable expense.

It was found that gold will dissolve in a cyanide solution if oxygen is present.  This revolutionized that gold recovery operation, because the water flow could be restricted so as not to wash the fine dust away.  The sluice box contents, now enriched in gold, could then be treated with a solution of sodium cyanide (much, much cheaper than mercury) and then the solution with the dissolved gold in can be processed to recover the metallic gold.  This is widely used to this day, and ores containing only about half a part per million can be recovered if they do not require a lot of preprocessing.  Half a part per million is difficult to get your arms around if you are not technical, so let us look at it this way.

A cube of water one meter to a side contains 1000 kg (2240 pounds).  1 mL of this water contains 1 g (0.035 ounces).  Thus, about 1/28th of an ounce is 1 part per million, so about 1/56 of an ounce is half a part per million.  So for an ore at this grade, 56 metric tons would be required to get one ounce.  However, it is not quite that simple.  I used ounces avoirdupois where 28.35 grams make an ounce.  Gold is weighed in ounces troy, at 31.1 grams per ounce.  That is just about 10% more, so actually a little more than 61 metric tons of ore would be required to be processed to get an ounce troy (worth about $1400 now) of gold from it.  That is a LOT of rock, about 138,000 pounds to get one ounce.  This is almost as heavy as two fully loaded semi rigs.

Obviously, there is a considerable amount of environmental consequence for handling this bulk of material, since the tailings (worked out ore) have to be disposed of somewhere.  Most folks do not ever think about the environment in connexion with gold, because we think of the old forty-niner gold panner.  Before hydraulic mining (as opposed to hydraulic recovery) was banned in the United States, entire riverbanks and other gold bearing sands were destroyed.  In hydraulic mining, huge, high pressure jets of water were used to disrupt the alluvial ore beds and direct them to the sluice boxes.  It was extraordinary destructive, both to the land and the water.  The rivers became loaded with silt, killing fish and everything else.

Some placer deposits are gotten to by dredging, where pumps pull in the silt in rivers and pass it over the sluices.  This certainly disturbs the benthic ecology, but the damage is not visible since it is under water.

By far the largest source of gold now is hard rock mining.  In the old westerns this is illustrated by the miner going underground and using a pick and shovel to get the rock, then loading it onto a cart and using a mule to bring it out of the mine.  It actually was possible for a sourdough to make a pretty good living at this, IF his claim were extremely rich.  A few struck it rich, and most died in poverty.

Now days hard rock mining is done with huge armies of workers and heavy machinery.  Just like coal or other minerals, there are two ways to do it:  open-pit mining or shaft mining.  Where the gold tends to run in well-defined veins, shaft mining is usually preferred because less material has to be handles.  Mining engineers can direct the digging to follow the veins, leaving the rock that does not have much gold in it in place.  This the lesser environmentally damaging of the two, since only the high grade ore is used, so tailings are reduced.  Crews of workers take power drills and drill holes around and into the vein, then blasters place explosives in the holes and blast the ore loose.  Then mechanized loaders and transporters ferry the ore out of the mine, where it is loaded onto trucks and taken to the refinery.  In a good vein, the gold may be rich enough that all that has to be done to refine it is to crush the ore and then melt the gold out of it.  Otherwise, it is usually enriched by sluicing or floatation after crushing, they subjected to cyanide.

When the gold does not run in veins, but is more of less evenly dispersed in the ore, open-pit mining is used.  Since gold, except for placer deposits, is rarely found in soft ground, a gold open pit gold mine is a great big hole in solid rock.  Drillers bore holes into the rock, and blasters set and detonate explosive charges to break the rock loose.  Huge loaders put the ore into equally huge trucks and it is taken the to refinery.  This is by far the most environmentally damaging way to mine gold, because huge amounts of tailings are left since all the rock, not just the rich veins, is used.  After crushing and enriching by sluicing or floatation, the ore is generally subjected to cyanide.

After the “raw” gold has been recovered, it has to undergo further processing to render it pure.  Gold almost always has silver in it, and often other metals as well.  Mercury is often present and presents a special challenge for the refinery because of its toxicity.  There are several ways to refine the gold to a high state of purity, but only two are used on a large scale.  If the purity of the gold is only required to be around 0.9995 or so, the Miller process is used.  It is pretty cheap, and for jewelry is good enough.  In this process, the gold is melted and chlorine gas is blown through it.  The chlorine reacts with almost all of the other materials, “burning” them to their respective metallic chlorides.  These form a slag and float on the gold, so the gold can be tapped from the bottom of the retort and separated.  The slag is valuable, since it usually has quite a bit of silver in it, so it is not discarded.

If gold of a higher purity is required, the more expensive Wohlwill process is used.  This is almost exactly the same one that is used to refine copper for electrical uses, since it gets most of the junk out of it.  Properly conducted, the Wohlwill process will produce 0.99999 fine gold.  In this process, Miller process gold is cast into a suitable shape and placed in a tank of electrolyte (chloroauric acid, HAuCl₄ dissolved in water).  Next to the Miller gold are placed very thin sheets of highly purified gold.  An electric current is started, and if the voltage and current density are controlled precisely, the gold in the Miller casting will dissolve and literally become electroplated to the thin, highly pure gold sheets.  The Miller casting (the anode, or positive electrode) gets smaller and smaller as the pure gold plates onto the originally very thin sheets of pure gold (the cathodes, or negative electrodes).  The impurities fall to the bottom of the tank.  Often these are valuable, since they can contain platinum or other valuable metals.  Unless extremely high purity gold is required, this process is not used because it costs a lot in electricity, is slow, and ties up gold for the electrolyte.

There are a couple of older processes that are used on small scales, like the one that you may have seen on the TeeVee where the assayer takes the impure gold, puts it in a porous clay cup, and fires it in an oven for some time.  In this process the impurities combine with oxygen and materials added as a flux (the gold does not) and sort of soak into the porous cup.  This is rarely used these days.

In both the Miller process and the clay cup process a significant amount of gold is lost by evaporation.  In all but the smallest scale operations, the flues from the operations are swept out on a regular basis to recover the gold that escaped from the process.

I almost forgot one other significant source for gold:  copper refining.  Just as gold almost always has some silver and copper in it, copper almost always has some gold and silver in it.  Trace amounts of impurities reduce the electrical conductivity of copper to such a point that it is useless for electrical work, so it is purified in its final step by a process almost exactly like the Wohlwill process for gold.  The impurities that fall to the bottom of the electrolytic cell in copper refining are quite valuable and are sold to gold producers.  This significantly offsets the cost of refining the copper.

These are the major sources for new gold.  Old gold is defined as gold recovered from previous uses.  Old jewelery is a significant source, and recycling of electronic components is becoming more important.

For the sake of being complete, I must mention that seawater has gold in it.  But it does not have much.  If all of the oceans were stripped of gold, it would amount to only about 10% of what has been mined since antiquity.  No scheme has ever been devised to recover gold from seawater economically.  We were talking about half a part per million in marginal ores a little while ago.  Seawater has been determined to contain about 20 parts per quadrillion.  A quadrillion is is a thousand million million!  Not very likely to be a good source for gold, in my estimate.

Now, on to the uses for the 10% of the gold that is mined annually that does not end up as jewelry or as coins or bullion.  Gold actually has comparatively few industrial uses compared to silver, which has myriads of uses, and even platinum, also with many, many uses.

Quite a bit of gold is used to plate delicate electronic connexions.  If you open up your desktop, you will see that the expansion cards have gold plated contacts, and the memory chips and CPU also have gold plated contacts.  The reason for this is that gold is an excellent conductor of electricity (third only to silver and copper) and does not corrode in the atmosphere.  Since both silver and copper form nonconductive oxides and/or sulfides in the atmosphere, gold is preferred for plating those delicate contacts so that they remain reliable.  Gold has a few other uses in electronics, sometimes being used for extremely fine wires to make connexions.  Silver of copper wires would eventually corrode and fail that the very fine diameters that gold wire is applied.

Gold is also used sometimes in electron microscopy.  When deposited in a very thin film on objects to be observed, the image quality can be enhanced by a large factor in many cases.  This is mainly because it is a good conductor of electricity (streams of electrons), so it forms a Faraday cage on the object to be observed, preventing the electrons from penetrating it and thus becoming defocused.

Gold used to be used in medicine quite a bit, and in the form of some chemical compounds was for many years the only effective (somewhat) treatment for rheumatoid arthritis (RA).  The newer generation of RA drugs has pretty much supplanted gold therapy, but it did allow much relief from suffering for many people back in the day.

It is sort of making a comeback in medicine as a carrier for chemotherapeutic agents, but this is sort of new.  Since metallic gold is biologically inert and nontoxic, it is well suited for these applications.  We shall see what the future holds for it there.

Not exactly medical, but still related, is the age old use of gold for dental work.  Pure gold is too soft for that, so special dental alloys have been developed for this use.  Even in an alloy, the corrosion resistance of gold suits is well for crowns and even more intricate work.  An extremely disturbing consequence of dental work is the documented historical record of the Nazis removing gold dental work from Holocaust victims during World War II to fund a little bit of the war effort.

A very old use for gold is making ruby red glass.  It does not take a lot to color glass, and even though cheaper substitutes have been found, many aficionados of colored glass strongly opine that nothing else has the subtle color that gold glass has.

A really interesting application for gold is to make ice proof windows for low temperature applications.  This works because it is possible to make deposits of gold on glass or Lexan that are so thin that light is transmitted, but that there is just a tad of electrical conductivity.  When a current is passed over such a treated glass, enough heat is generated to keep it free from ice.

If you watch on the TeeVee anything to do with satellite launches, you will often notice that the insulation that is often used is gold colored.  It is gold, in a very thin film.  It turns out that gold is particularly reflective for infrared radiation, so this gold coated insulation is particularly effective.  Besides, it costs more to lift payload than gold costs by orders of magnitude, so in these applications the cost of the gold is not important, but its efficiency is.

Actually, these few applications are just about all that there are for gold other than those that we discussed Friday.  The bulk of the attraction for gold remains that it is a pretty, shiny thing.  Even the insulation application mentioned is related to it being shiny.  I am sure that I missed a couple, but to my knowledge this is about it.  I should mention its use in photography, which is dwindling rapidly.  It was used to soften the harsh contrast differences that silver alone could produce, sort of hinting at a more natural color, particularly in photographic portraits of people.  With the advent of digital photography, it is ironic that the gold in the electrical contacts is now more important than the silver in the film emulsions!

Now for what I consider to be the most important use that gold ever had.  Because gold is the most malleable (able to be hammered into extremely thin sheets) of all known substances, the brilliant physicist New Zealand born, but British citizen Ernest Rutherford used it to change our understanding of nature.  He was curious about the models of the atom of his day, which were all over the place.  He gets all of the credit but his graduate students actually did the work!  By the way, one of them was Hans Geiger, forever remembered for his radiation detector.  Anyway, Rutherford wanted to see if the “plum pudding” model of the atom was valid.

In that model, atoms were collections of protons and electrons (the neutron had not yet been discovered, this was 1909) that pretty much were a sea of positive charges with negative ones embedded in it to make it electrically neutral, giving essentially a homogeneous (at least by mass distribution) material.  Rutherford reasoned that if he were able to shoot some bullets through it, they would all be deflected more or less and form a diffuse shadow on a target.  He chose a screen of a phosphor that would give a flash of light when his bullet, an alpha particle from a bit of radium bromide in a lead can with a little hole in it to provide a narrow column.  The alphas would make the phosphor glow.

He reasoned that he needed something only a couple of atoms thick, so he chose gold foil of the thinnest variety available, almost transparent to the eye.  When Geiger and his fellow student put the alpha gun one one side of the foil and the screen of the other, all that they initially saw was a bright spot directly in front of the gun.  That made no sense.  They should have seen a half dollar, dim spot if the plum pudding model were correct.  As they watched, they saw single flashes all over the screen, and various angles.  The put up bigger screens, and saw that sometimes a flash would occur behind the gun!

Rutherford finally realized that the only way to explain this was to abandon the plum pudding, homogeneous model of the atom and replace it with what is much more like our current one:  the atom is mostly empty space, with a very small, very dense positive nucleus in the center and a very diffuse cloud of electrons around it.  The math worked out to indicate that the nucleus contained, in its very small volume, almost all of the mass of the atom.

That, my friends, was the genesis of quantum mechanics in many ways.  Other giants stood on Rutherford’s shoulders, and we are still learning.

Well, you have done it again.  You have wasted many more einsteins of perfectly good photons reading this metallic tasting drivel.  And even though the Republicans pretend that they will be civil when they read me say this, I always learn much more than I could possibly hope to teach by writing this series, so please keep those comments, questions, corrections, and other feedback coming.  I shall stay around for Comment Time tonight, and return tomorrow after Keith is over for Review Time.

Warmest regards,

Doc

Crossposted at Docudharma.com and at Dailykos.com

Premiers all over.  60 Minutes because of the ball game.  Animation Domination.  PBS counter programs with Downton Abbey.  68th Golden Globes.

I do want to thank you for offering such a powerful piece of manpower as Virgil Tibbs.

• ABC Family– Matilda, Bruce Almighty
• AMC– Chronicles of Riddick x 2
• Bravo– Real Housewives marathon (with premier)
• Disney– Part 3 of The Suite Life on Deck Twister Trilogy, Good Luck Charlie (premiers)
• Discovery– Animals Attack!
• ESPN– Hoopies, Nuggets @ Spurs
• ESPN2– Breakneck, Australian Open
• Food– Worst (premier)
• FX– Iron Man
• – Ax Men (last week’s and new), [Top Gear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T… (premier)
• Lifetime– Soul Food, Beauty Shop
• Oxygen– Titanic
• Sci Fi– Underworld, Underworld: Evolution
• Style– The Dish (premier)
• TBS– Meet the Fockers x 2
• Turner Classic– In the Heat of the Night, The Liberation of L.B. Jones
• TNT– Transformers x 2 (in case you didn’t get enough last night)
• Toon– Young Justice League (Part 2 of the Series Premier repeat), Clone Wars (Part 2 of the Nightsisters Trilogy repeat)
• USA– NCIS marathon
• Vs.– Bullriding and Snowboarding

Orpheus! I am known to men as Dr. Orpheus! And mine is to perceive and control the delicate arrangement of the cosmos!

They give out Ph.Ds for that?

Junior college upstate, communication major, minor in women’s studies. But I assure you, sir, the doctor title was bestowed upon me by a higher power than a mere college professor!

The Venture Brothers– Eeney, Meeney, Miney… Magic, Ghosts of the Sargasso

Oh, ya’ think, genius. What was it that tipped ya’ off, brainiac? Was it the rubber mask; maybe the huge zipper? But you had to go and kill ‘im anyway. If you’d a played by the rules, the Ghost Pirate rules, none of this would have happened! But, no, you had to go and kill a guy.

Later-

• AMC– Pitch Black
• FX– Lights Out (Series Premier repeat), Hellboy II: The Golden Army
• Lifetime– Bond of Silence
• Oxygen– The Other Boleyn Girl
• Sci Fi– Skinwalkers, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
• TBS– Fun With Dick & Jane (not the good 1977 version)
• Turner Classic– Dekigokoro (shhhhh)
• TNT– I Am Legend (why remake a Charlton Heston movie?)
• Toon– Childrens Hospital, Robot Chicken (premier), Moral Orel Charity (Episode 4)
• USA– Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, The Big Bounce

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Battles in Tunis as new government takes shape

by Dario Thuburn, AFP

52 mins ago

2 Plot uncovered in Tunisia as unity talks held

by Dario Thuburn, AFP

Sun Jan 16, 11:25 am ET

3 South Sudan’s Kiir prays to forgive north for war

by Peter Martell, AFP

2 hrs 23 mins ago

4 Count underway to decide if south Sudan secedes

by Peter Martell, AFP

Sun Jan 16, 6:24 am ET

5 Hu looks for ‘common ground’ in landmark US visit

by Andrew Gully, AFP

2 hrs 41 mins ago

6 Europe split over boosting euro crisis fund

by Laurent Thomet, AFP

Sun Jan 16, 6:58 am ET

7 Golden Globes to launch Hollywood awards season

by Michael Thurston, AFP

Sat Jan 15, 9:31 pm ET

8 Australia beat England in first one-dayer

AFP

Sun Jan 16, 7:17 am ET

9 Tunisia forces fight presidential guards at palace

By Tarek Amara and Christian Lowe, Reuters

2 hrs 47 mins ago

10 China’s Hu resists U.S. yuan concerns

By Susan Cornwell Susan Cornwell – 31 mins ago

(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

This diary is a re-publication of an essay from April, 2008.  It seems worth publishing again in honor of Dr. King.

I’m thinking about times almost forty years ago when I sang, “We Shall Overcome.” I’m remembering how I felt when I sang it, holding hands, swaying, anticipation in the air. I loved the idea of walking hand in hand, black and white together, and at the same time there was always a tension, a tightness in my jaw and in the pit of my stomach, the presence of fear. The song’s purpose was to get ready to do what had to be done. I’m committed to nonviolence, I recall thinking, but there are those who are not. They shot James Meredith, and lynched Emmitt Till, and burned Greyhound buses, and unlike me, they don’t want me to be safe. Uncertainty about what will happen tightens my jaw, while my heart commits me to the cause.

Remembering these fears rekindles my old thoughts. I remember the policemen in the church parking lot writing down the license plate numbers as if it were the Apalachin Crime Convention. My mind flashes from people sitting in a restaurant who stop eating to stare and sneer, to the incomprehensible Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to the repeated, threatening phone calls, to kids on a school bus yelling hate names through the windows, to the Klan and the police, and wondering how they were different. I think about the person who ran over my dog.

I’m remembering singing “our song” in Port Gibson during the boycott trial and fearfully contemplating the long, dark ride home to Jackson on the Natchez Trace, an unlit, two-lane road that avoids all towns.

I’m remembering the Woolworth’s lunch counter and the bus station in Jackson, notorious before my arrival, at which friends were seriously injured. I’m remembering the two unequal, racially labeled water fountains at the Courthouse in Laurel, and the three bathroom doors upstairs at the Mayflower Restaurant. I’m remembering a black man pumping the gasoline, that his boss won’t let him touch the $5 I try to hand him.

I’m remembering a Mississippi judge hissing that he doesn’t have to put up with Communists– he’s talking about me– in his Court. I’m remembering the Neshoba County Fair and what it must have been like on the night Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were all killed, how everyone there must have known about it.

Awash in this flood of distant memories, my remembrance of my own feelings is more opaque. I was learning to be a good lawyer, and I was an optimist, believing that eventually, we would confront and overcome racism and poverty and oppression and violence. But I was also numb while my unworkable marriage was sliding slowly, unconsciously and miserably to ultimate dissolution by another southern Court.

Then, in 1973, I started to represent inmates of the sprawling Mississippi State Hospital because Barry Powell, an excellent lawyer and mentor, “discovered” it and convinced himself and me that the issues should be litigated. Most of the people warehoused there, it turned out, were safe to release, but the staff was too small to have any idea who was safe and who might be risky. For obvious cases, like the four older women who played remarkably skilled bridge using sign language to bid and hadn’t seen a doctor in 7 years, release was accomplished simply, by my inquiry if they could go home and my veiled threat of a judicial proceeding if they couldn’t.

The harder cases were like Mr. O’Reilly (not his real name), who also wanted to be released. Doctors thought Mr. O’Reilly might be mentally ill because he still believed that ten years before somebody, a relative most likely, stole a million dollars worth of gold coins from his trailer in rural Oktibehha County and he was mad about it. According to the doctor, Mr. O’Reilly didn’t have any insight into his delusional system and his obvious anger made him dangerous.

Mr. O’Reilly was tall and sunburnt from years of taking major tranquilizers and being outside, and he walked with his back arched, elbows back, hands on the small of his back, another side effect of the drugs. I explained the situation to Mr. O’Reilly. I told him that the doctor didn’t believe the million dollar story, and that frankly, I didn’t either. In fact, I doubted there were ever $50 worth of gold coins in his entire county, and that when he acted angry about the situation, he was scaring the doctor. He laughed, “So is that what all the fuss’s about? How come nobody told me this before?” I shrugged. He said, “Well, I guess I’ll be going home then,” and he shambled off, doing the phenothiazine walk.

At the time the Hospital Staff decided who would be released by individually interviewing all the inmates who requested release. When asked, Mr. O’Reilly said he came in complaining about the theft of a million dollars worth of gold coins, that he didn’t blame anybody for not believing him, and that he doubted the story made sense. Was he mad about it? No, he said, just sad that he didn’t understand the problem earlier. Could he go home?

After Mr. O’Reilly was released, the Mississippi Mental Health Commissioner, Reginald White, told me that he thought I was doing “litigation therapy” and that he was surprised that people who were so obviously disoriented when they arrived were now going home. Did I think it was because of the intensive attention I was giving them? Or was it just time, the drugs, spontaneous change, and “millieu therapy”? At the time I didn’t have any idea. I just wanted inmates who wanted to go home to be released.

And this January, more than  forty years later, with my wife of 30 years and two of my three children, I attended an Interfaith Service commemorating Dr. King’s Holiday in Hudson, New York. After wonderful gospel music by the Shiloh Baptist Church choir, a sermon, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, prayer and scripture, the time came at last to sing “our song.” It had been a long time. My eyes grew wet. I could feel an aching in my throat and in my heart my continuous, decades long love of justice, fairness, and equality. And there was no fear. Instead, there was only my unbounded joy that now, at last, my kids would learn and experience the magic of “our song.” It was their turn to inherit the possibility of accomplishing the unthinkable, and it was their opportunity to forge a deep, personal heart connection with the community and movement for human dignity and justice.

“We Shall Overcome” has never been sweeter to me. I can feel how very far I have traveled. Although there remains an enormous journey to complete, the holiday celebration brought me the gift of seeing for the first time that my kids will soon be able, by themselves, to carry the movement on. Forty years ago I never could have guessed how special, how complete and wonderful that would feel.