GregWalcher.com

Walcher: Who decides what species come back from extinction?

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A British biologist named John Gurdon won a Nobel Prize for discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become “pluripotent.” That means mature cells can be converted into stem cells, so brain cells can be changed into heart, foot, or skin cells. That enabled Gurdon in 1962 to clone the first vertebrate in his lab, an African clawed frog, now considered an invasive species in most of Europe, China, and the U.S.

This was interesting mainly to scientists until 1996 when a Scottish lab cloned the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly, an overnight global media sensation. It proved that the nucleus from an adult cell, transferred into an unfertilized egg, can divide and develop in the same mysterious way it does in a real womb.

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Walcher: It’s not just Chinese farmland—it’s unchecked federal control over 700 million acres

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An article BBC Science Focus highlights the difficulties of “multi-tasking,” handling several things at a time, which apparently most of us don’t do very well. “In an ideal world, we’d focus on one task at a time, get it finished and only then move onto something else.”

But in real life, “It’s all too common for you to be making great progress on one thing, when… BAM! You suddenly need to deal with something else.”

That is common, not only in our personal lives, but also in government. In the decade I worked on Capitol Hill, no crisis happened on any Monday morning. Instead, whenever we were winding down some big project, a new crisis would appear, usually at 4:00 pm on Friday. Multi-tasking wasn’t a popular term back then, but it aptly describes many situations in government.

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Walcher: Want to fix Congress? Break the budget process first

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A popular blogger called Taylor Cone gave some great advice for budding inventors, discussing the process of prototyping: build it, then break it, then fix it. That’s a strategy Congress ought to try.

The House Appropriations Committee, Congress’s most powerful panel, has 63 members, only 8 of whom have ever voted to do what the law requires of them, namely, to pass 12 appropriation bills to fund government agencies and programs. In fact, Congress has passed the required bills on time only 4 times in the last 40 years, the last time 26 years ago. Only 25 of the 435 House members and 8 of the 100 Senators were even in Congress then, all of them now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. They may not even remember how it was supposed to work.

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Walcher: The “sky is falling” water narrative doesn’t hold water

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Every year for the past 25, at least, negotiating teams for the seven states on the Colorado River have worked to overcome a new crisis, invariably driven by two entities: the State of California and the federal Bureau of Reclamation (BOR).

For a quarter-century, those teams have responded to federal pressure based on the dubious theory that an ongoing drought, and a resulting decline in the river’s flow, somehow changed the law and gave BOR authority to ignore the Interstate Compact.

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Walcher: We built it, and they still won’t come

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Building a new subdivision is complicated. Almost every city and county in America have master plans dictating “conforming uses” of land. Most specify lot and home sizes, rules for vehicle access, water supply, sewage disposal, flood control, affordable housing, and park space. Those are addressed in lengthy application processes and public hearings, all preceding building the infrastructure, and then the homes.

The National Association of Home Builders says government regulations account for 24 percent of the final price of new homes. Sixty percent of that comes during planning and development, only 40 percent during actual construction.

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