Half-time review

This is a photo from outside of the Modern Art Gallery in Glasgow - the statue with the cone on its head is a classic piece of Glasweigan iconography and I was pleased to see that, while many of the pubs I used to frequent have changed hands or disappeared, the traffic cone on Wellington's head remains constant.

As I'm sitting in London, basking in the warmth of pies that actually have meat in them, shit weather, catching up with old friends and watching the BBC news, this seems like a good time to reflect on what we've learned so far about the US. If I were to score the country like a high school student, the report card would be somewhat mixed: while the US scores well on some things, it continues to linger at the bottom of the class in many subjects.

My first impression of the beer in the US has very much been confirmed - the craft beers found in the US are truly delicious and I've made a far more comprehensive study of these now. It is not unusual to find a bar that has at least 15 excellent beers on tap, with many more available in bottle. Coming back to the UK has been a bit of a shock, with many bars not going beyond offering a few dodgy European imports and (if you're lucky) Guinness and a couple of cask ales.

However, there are definitely some green shoots visible - Scottish supermarkets are starting to offer some craft beers (in the name of science, I sampled widely) and we found one bar in Edinburgh, The Hanging bat, which offered a selection of 16 craft beers in keg, and another half dozen or so from the cask. Most of the beers were sourced from within the UK and were just as good as anything I've found in the US; there must be other similar bars around the UK. So, while craft beer explosion that happened in the US has yet to come here, I don't think it's far away...

Another first impression that I've confirmed is that the baseline quality of food in the US is higher - pub grub almost always comes with some nice side salads or steamed veg, while the definition of a salad back home ("la salade anglaise", as I like to call it) still consists of a sad, naked mix of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. Excellent food does exist here at home, but in general you have to pay more for the equivalent quality. The one exception to this is ethnic food - Indian and Chinese food in the US is simply bland and terrible. I'm not sure if this is because the food is adjusted to the American palate or because they've just not had the same level of immigration? If I had a restaurant like Kismot in Edinburgh (amazing Indian / Bangledeshi deliciousness) or Banana Leaf in Glasgow (tiny little hole-in-the-wall doing the best South Indian food I've come across), then living in the US would be much more tolerable. We've only really sampled DC so perhaps other parts of the US does better, and Ethiopian and Latin-American food can be very good in DC.

While the superficial things like food and drink make living in the US good fun, when you consider: quality of life in terms of holiday / parental leave, primitive provision of socialised medicine and the American dream, which states you can have anything you want if you work hard enough but if you're poor it's your own fault for not trying hard enough; these things show that the US still has a lot of growing-up to do before it can really be considered a proper country. A fact I would like to repeat here is that only four countries in the world have no statutory paid maternal leave: Papua New Guinea, Liberia, Swaziland and the USA. When the "land of the free" is lagging behind Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba and the rest of the world, you know something has to be fixed.

More poignantly, the recent US government shutdown demonstrates that the political system has basically ground to a halt and is making the country ungovernable. However, the prolonged madness of the shutdown has at least highlighted how bat-shit crazy the Tea Party wing of the Republican party actually is. Hopefully there is enough anger in the country to force some sort of political change although I can't imagine what shape this change would take.

The thing that is most confusing about the US is that I meet huge numbers of people who would agree with most of the last two paragraphs - many Americans are actually very reasonable, intelligent people who believe that the government should do more to help the poor and sick, and that the US should engage positively with the rest of the world. But the design of the US political system is such that a small minority of nutters can bring the whole thing tumbling down. If everyone plays by the rules, the US system should force compromise and produce better legislation. This fails when someone throws their toys out of the pram.

It is fascinating, if nothing else. We're just over halfway through our American adventure now: we initially planned to come for two years, but science is going surprisingly well so we'll stick around a bit longer. My complaints may make the US seem like a terrible place at times, but it is very easy to live there, even without a car or a decent credit rating. One thing that the US does do much better than the UK and parts of Europe (and, sadly, also Canada now, but that is another story) is that it still invests heavily in its science and even though grant approval rates are at an all-time low, the system it at least relatively transparent and the playing field is fairly level.

Whilst the US is a very good place to do science, is that enough to make us consider staying there long term? In a word: no. Although we're enjoying our time there and are grateful for the opportunity to do our science there, the US is just not home. As individuals, it's easy to live there but as left-wing, environmentally-aware, socialist hippies, we don't really belong in the US. It would also be nice to live in a country where at least one of us does not need a visa..! It's looking increasingly like we belong in Europe, especially now that Stephen Harper (evil conservative Prime Minister) is working his hardest to undo everything that makes Canada good. But that will need a long rant into itself, so will have to wait for another day.

Still Ploughing the Furlough

I guess I should point out here that everything in the following post is my own opinion and is in no way representative of that of the government agency where I work. I don't think that I need to worry about this as I'm not actually considered a government employee due to being a lowly postdoctoral fellow, but better safe than sorry.


Unbelievably, the US government is still shut down, almost two weeks after I wrote my last blog post. This is the self-described "greatest representative democracy in the world". Sorry, that was a cheap shot. Although, even now, House representatives have described US democracy as "the envy of the world" during debates, as recently as last week. One could wonder how the US media would be describing this farcical, manufactured political crisis if it happened in a different country, but one doesn't have to, as the Slate already made an attempt here. My favourite line is:

"The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity."

Okay, enough petty bitching. As I said before, being furloughed isn't the end of the world as my work doesn't directly save lives in the immediate-term. However, the government shutdown is affecting the greater science community. During the shut-down, it's illegal to present any data gathered at US government facilities, which makes it impossible for us to attend conferences and share our research with other scientists, even if these conferences were planned months in advance and already paid for by the government. I heard of one researcher who landed in Australia on Tuesday 1st of October to present at a conference, only to be told that she couldn't give her talk and had to grab the first flight back to the US. I can't think of a bigger waste of time, not to mention government resources. Well, maybe the UK trident programme where the UK buys weapons of mass destruction and pretends that it's still a superpower, but that's not relevant here.

I was due to give a talk in Glasgow next week as I'll be home anyway, but some of the data I need are on a hard drive in the lab and I can't access the facility during a shut-down to pick it up. Not to mention that actually preparing the talk at home during the shutdown is technically illegal as well. As is checking government email...

The shutdown has delayed my own work by at least a month or two: all of my experiments require transgenic mice to be a certain age and once the mice are older than this, they become useless so have to be euthanised. This will be the same for many researchers at government facilities so if you scale this up, I'd hate to think how many thousands of animals will be completely wasted due to a political mess. And this is just basic research - shutting down the government has much more tragic, human consequences, such as denying sick children access to clinical trials.

Beyond government facilities, the shutdown is starting to affect scientific research on a much larger scale. Any research grant due to be reviewed or paid out this month will be delayed, causing breaks in research or even leaving labs unable to pay research. A radio telescope in Virginia was closed on 4th October due to lack of funds, and the NSF is having to evacuate researchers from the Antarctic research station.  An editorial in Nature describes this aspect of the shutdown better than I can.

Many aspects of biology rely on huge databases to act as repositories for genome sequences, protein structures or searchable databases of scientific literature. These databases are truly fantastic resources that are used globally, but they are funded and operated by the NIH. "Essential' workers are in place, but there is only enough staff to keep the servers running but not updated. My wife is an environmental microbiologist, and an important task in this field is uploading the genetic sequences of organisms found in your samples to NCBI, which is important for both data-sharing and a prerequisite for publication. These databases are curated by humans to make sure that data is uploaded in a reasonably standardised format, so not only is the shutdown slowing down the reporting and publication of data, but it will be creating an epic backlog for when the government does finally re-open.

So, when will the government re-open? According to the Washington Post, a deal may well emerge in the Senate today. Given that the debt-ceiling is due to be reached in 2 days, it's about bloody time. Even if a deal does emerge in time, if any senators dislike it (Ted Cruz, we're looking at you here), they could still delay it by several days. And then it could get a rough ride from the House of Representatives, who started all this mess in the first place. I guess all we can do is buy some popcorn and sit back and watch the show.

Just as a quick footnote: I've been reading the US constitution recently. Mostly because I don't have many friends and am not allowed to work during the furlough. ANYWAY, the 14th Amendment to the US constitution (section 4) states that:

"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

I would interpret this to mean that the debt ceiling in itself is unconstitutional so, in times of crisis like this, Obama could unilaterally decide to raise it and pay, at the least, interest to US treasury bond holders and prevent the economy from going down the pants. He could invoke the 14th Amendment and claim to be defending the constitution. Which is basically his job.

This isn't a new idea. During the last shutdown threat, in 2011, Garret Epps, a constitutional lawyer, wrote this piece in the Atlantic. Some other articles were written (here and here), which support that position, although someone else argued that only congress has the authority to borrow money on behalf of the US government so the 14th doesn't apply. I'm not convinced - it seems like a simple, legal solution to the madness in the House. But what do I know? I'm neither USian nor a lawyer, I'm just a lowly foreign scientist who would like to get back to work.

Ploughing the Furlough

The US government is currently shut for business, as you've no doubt gathered by now. From my foreign perspective, the government appears to have been forced into a shutdown by a bunch of extremists on the right, who are trying to undo a law that has been on the statute books since 2010, survived more than 40 attempts to repeal it, been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court and was effectively re-mandated by last year's presidential election (* see below).

Instead of spending a bit of time ranting about how bat-shit crazy this is, I'll let John Stewart from the Daily Show do it for me:



Since last weekend, I've started taking more of an interest in US politics and been watching debates in both houses on C-Span. Given the insane rhetoric coming from the Tea Partyists, the first thing that struck me was how orderly and calm the debate from the floor of the House of Representatives seemed to be, on a superficial level, as I'm used to watching the unruly rabble that is the House of Commons in Westminster. Politeness aside, the way bills pass through the House is pretty insane. Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is very much a partisan position and he/she gets to choose which bills are debated on the floor. The current situation means that, even though many Republicans are actually reasonable people, the Speaker John Boehner (pronounced Baner, apparently) has to pander to the extremists in his party and can't table a budget bill that doesn't have partisan demands (such as defunding Obamacare) without risking his own job, even though there are enough reasonable people in the House to pass such a bill. The net result is that the government has to stay closed until both houses and the president agree on some bill that provides money for the government.

So, I'm writing this blog post from my kitchen table, because the institute I work at is part of the federal government and has now been furloughed. We had to turn up for work yesterday so that we could "phase down" our work in an orderly way and had to be off campus by 12pm. Many businesses in DC have offered bar and food deals to furloughed federal employees (all of us non-essential types), so yesterday was quite good fun. I do appreciate that, as a lowly postdoc working in a science lab, I'm one of the lucky ones as my funding is allocated on an annual basis and I'm not technically a government employee (I work AT the government, but not FOR the government) so I'll still be paid during the shutdown. But this news is not so good for most of the government workers - many of the low-paid workers who actually keep my building running will be sent home until further notice with no guarantee of being paid for the time spent on furlough when the government eventually re-opens. If the shutdown goes on for an extended period of time, federal food programmes for poorer people will start to run out of money, spreading the pain even further. Of course, members of Congress continue to be paid during a furlough.

While the work I do is important, it's not essential - my research means everything to me but no-one will die if I can't do experiments this week. However, being shut out of our labs is still a ridiculous waste of money - a lot of my experiments depend on having mice at the correct age so a huge number of animal lives will be wasted because they can't be used at the appropriate time, which is ethically unacceptable. As I'm not a federal employee, I'm in a bit of a grey area where the furlough might not actually apply to me, but I'm on a temporary visa and the maximum penalty for working during a furlough is a $10,000 fine and up to a year in prison, so I'm going to err on the side of caution here. Technically, we're not even allowed to check work email during a furlough as this counts as working from home. Up until now, I thought the only sure way to make a scientist stop working was to threaten their coffee supply, but even a small risk of arrest and deportation is an amazing disincentive. Not to mention that my route to work involves cycling through a national park, which has also been shut down.

One interesting thing that I've learned about during this is that, because Washington DC is not a proper state, it is only subject to federal laws and, even though the district funded through taxation of those of us who live here, it's not allowed to spend its own money during a government shutdown. Services are still running at the moment because they have some emergency funds, but soon services like rubbish collection could grind to a halt, even though DC has plenty of money in the bank. Thankfully, the DC mayor says that he will keeping things running in spite of congress.

So, what happens next? Well, I'd quite like congress to sort their shit out so that I can get back to work. This could drag on for weeks, though. There's a second crisis just around the corner, when the federal reserve will run out of money in mid-October unless a law is passed that allows it to borrow more money to fund government services. While a shutdown is annoying, I don't even want to imagine what will happen if the US government was forced to default on its debt. Even the extreme right are not that crazy, are they!? I think Churchill got it spot-on when he said "you can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else."

** Update: two bits of essential reading for understanding the furlough: a brutally honest piece from Al Jazeera and an insightful piece from the Atlantic **


(*A bit of background to the US government structure for folks back home: the US government is split into three legislative branches: the Presidency, the Judiciary and Congress, which are all supposed to balance each other. The role of the President is fairly obvious, the Supreme court is used to determine whether laws are constitutional and Congress, split into the Senate and House of Representatives, is the main law-making body. The Senate gives each state equal representation of two senators per state, whilst the number of representatives in the house is allocated to states on a population basis. Wikipedia explains it all rather well. In order for a bill to be signed into law, it has to be approved by both houses and then signed off by the president, who can also choose to veto a law. In principle, this structure should force a situation where no one body can wield undue power and drive through unpopular laws. However, if part of the legislature goes insane, it appears that it can block any bill from passing and bring a government to its knees, as is currently happening.)