Archive | June, 2012

In Citizens United II, How Justices Rule May Be an Issue Itself – NYTimes.com

11 Jun

The Montana Supreme Court has decided that “that a state law regulating corporate political spending was constitutional notwithstanding Citizens United.” The US Supreme Court is expected to reverse that decision later this week. However . . .

The main question on Thursday, then, will be how the court will reverse the Montana decision. It could call for briefs, set the case down for argument in the fall and issue a decision months later. Or it could use a favorite tool of the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — the summary reversal.

Nine times so far this year, the court has issued an unsigned opinion ruling on the merits of a dispute without full briefing or oral argument. Such rulings have been the subject of criticism from practitioners and the legal academy. These critics say it is a mistake to resolve cases without adequate information and deliberation. It is also problematic, they add, to do so anonymously.

The latest critique arrived this month in The Tulane Law Review in an article by Ira P. Robbins, a law professor at American University. It was called “Hiding Behind the Cloak of Invisibility,” and it considered “per curiam” opinions, ones issued “by the court” without indication of authorship. “In the first six years of Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure,” Professor Robbins wrote, “almost 9 percent of the court’s full opinions were per curiams.”

Such opinions suggest that what they have to say is so simple and obvious that no serious judicial effort is needed. Yet not a few unsigned majority opinions have come with dissents. That combination — an unsigned majority decision and a signed dissent — was “an oxymoronic form, one that simultaneously insisted on both institutional consensus and individual disagreement,” Laura Krugman Ray, a law professor at the Widener University School of Law, wrote in 2000 in The Nebraska Law Review.

Prof Ray believes that this is a history-making case and that all “should sign on to what he or she subscribes to.” We agree. But we also fear that we are increasingly ruled by powerful cowards. We’ll see.

via In Citizens United II, How Justices Rule May Be an Issue Itself – NYTimes.com.

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Will the Middle East starve? – Middle East – Salon.com

10 Jun

Just so you know, the USA isn’t the only country pushing against the edges of its natural resources. Here’s a fascinating article about Saudi Arabia, water, and food. Oil won’t be able to buy everything.

There is a madness about farming in the desert — especially when temperatures are above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, there isn’t a river for hundreds of miles, and the only water is more than a mile underground. The technological bravado is breathtaking, but Saudis are slowly realizing that it cannot go on. That their dream of turning oil wealth into food self-sufficiency is doomed, and they will have to get food from elsewhere. I heard this at a conference on the country’s changing attitude to water, held at the Jeddah Hilton in 2009. … Not far away a huge desalination plant was making the waters of the Red Sea drinkable for the city.

Saudi Arabians have grown colossally rich on the country’s oil reserves. They have grown used to the idea that petrodollars can buy them anything. But Saudis are waking up to the fact that all their wealth will count for nothing if they have nothing to eat.

via Will the Middle East starve? – Middle East – Salon.com.

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Our Animal Natures – NYTimes.com

10 Jun

Animals and humans get the same diseases; we even like to get high.

A century or two ago, in some rural communities, animals and humans were cared for by the same practitioner. And physicians and veterinarians both claim the same 19th-century doctor, William Osler, as a father of their fields. However, animal and human medicine began a decisive split in the late 1800s. Increasing urbanization meant that fewer people relied on animals to make a living. Motorized vehicles began pushing work animals out of daily life.

via Our Animal Natures – NYTimes.com.

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Open Tree of Life Project Draws In Every Twig and Leaf – NYTimes.com

10 Jun

The Tree of Life – How many species? 2 million, 10 million? 100 million? And it’s not really a tree.

The most familiar species, those of animals and plants, will take up only a tiny part of the tree. “Most biodiversity on earth is microbial,” said Dr. Katz, the biologist at Smith.

Microbes also pose a special challenge. The branches of the tree of life represent how organisms pass their genes to their descendants. But microbes also transfer genes among one another. Those transfers can join branches separated by billions of years of evolution.

“In a lot of the tree of life, it’s not really treelike,” Dr. Cranston said.

She and her colleagues are exploring how they can build their database to include these gene transfers, and how best to visualize them. “That’s an issue we intend to struggle with for the next three years,” Dr. Katz said.

via Open Tree of Life Project Draws In Every Twig and Leaf – NYTimes.com.

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Huge Japanese dock washes up on US beach – Channel NewsAsia

9 Jun

What’s the message in this bottle?

PORTLAND, Oregon: A huge floating dock cast adrift by Japan’s killer tsunami has washed up on an Oregon beach, believed to be the biggest piece of flotsam to make landfall on the US West Coast so far.

The 66-foot (20-metre) long rectangular structure, made of concrete and metal, was spotted floating off the coast on Monday, and then washed in with the high tide on Agate beach, 100 miles (160 kilometres) southwest of Portland.

via Huge Japanese dock washes up on US beach – Channel NewsAsia.

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Apocalypse soon – Environment – Salon.com

8 Jun

By 2025, just 13 years from now, humans will have modified half of all the land on Earth. We will have turned space that once supported complicated systems of plants, animals, soils, water and microbes into cities or farms. Already, we’ve taken over 43 percent of the land. What’s left is mostly criss-crossed by our roads. By 2060, 70 percent of the earth’s surface could be covered with human development.

According to the group of more than 20 scientists responsible for these observations, published this week in Nature, these shifts could also be pushing the Earth toward a tipping point — a round of irreversible planet-wide changes. …

Here’s a taste of what could be coming. Within a century, “climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12-39% of Earth,” the scientists report. Sooner than that, by 2070, the average global temperature “will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.” Shifts like the one the report considers have meant that not only do certain species face extinction, but new varieties of creatures begin to thrive. From a human perspective, though, the most important changes will be to the resources we depend upon for survival. Within a few generations, the forests, fisheries and agricultural systems that feed us could change so much they’ll no longer be able to support our species in the fashion to which we’ve become accustomed.

via Apocalypse soon – Environment – Salon.com.

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Why Elites Fail | The Nation

8 Jun

A pure functioning meritocracy would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility. As the educational system and business world got better and better at finding inherent merit wherever it lay, you would see the bright kids of the poor boosted to the upper echelons of society, with the untalented progeny of the best and brightest relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid where they belong.

But the Iron Law of Meritocracy makes a different prediction: that societies ordered around the meritocratic ideal will produce inequality without the attendant mobility. Indeed, over time, a society will become more unequal and less mobile as those who ascend its heights create means of preserving and defending their privilege and find ways to pass it on across generations. And this, as it turns out, is a pretty spot-on description of the trajectory of the American economy since the mid-1970s.

via Why Elites Fail | The Nation.

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Business – Derek Thompson – 2.6 Trillion Pounds of Garbage: Where Does the World’s Trash Go? – The Atlantic

7 Jun

This year, the world will generate 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage — the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings. What kind of trash is it? Where does it all go?

The answer is that just under half of it comes from “organic” waste — food, mostly — and most of it goes into landfills, according to a new report this week from the World Bank. Here’s that story in pie charts, provided by the report.

The rest of the article consists of pie charts showing distribution of trash. Half is produced by the OECD countries  while Africa and South Asia produce the least.

via Business – Derek Thompson – 2.6 Trillion Pounds of Garbage: Where Does the World’s Trash Go? – The Atlantic.

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Rocky Anderson wins California Primary for Peace and Freedom – Rocky Anderson 2012

6 Jun

Rocky Anderson won the California primary of the Peace and Freedom Party yesterday! Rocky received 43.4% of the vote, with his two competitors receiving 30% and 26.5%. The party’s nomination will ultimately be determined at its convention August 4th and 5th.

The Peace and Freedom Party was founded in 1967 on the principles of peace, workers’ rights, democracy, ecology, feminism, and racial equality. These are issues Rocky Anderson has fought for throughout his career as a lawyer, community activist, mayor and Executive Director of the Human Rights Campaign.

via Rocky Anderson wins California Primary for Peace and Freedom – Rocky Anderson 2012.

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Kohr Principles – NYTimes.com

5 Jun

Leonard Kohr argued that nations like the USA are too large, making catastrophic failure inevitable in the long run.

Unsurprisingly, Kohr’s guiding principle was anarchism, “the noblest of philosophies.” But its inherent nobility, he recognized, also made it utopian: a truly anarchist society could do away with governments and states only if all individuals were ethical enough to respect one another’s boundaries. Kohr cleverly turned this utopianism upside down, from weakness to strength: any party, any leader, any ideology promising utopia is automatically wrong, or lying [7]. Acceptance of utopia’s unattainability, in other words, is the best insurance against totalitarianism.

But if the ideal state cannot be attained, at least it can be approached, Kohr thought, by reducing the scale of government. Which sounds a lot like the famous quote from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”: “That government is best which governs least.” But in Kohr’s vision, smaller government should mean, first and foremost, a smaller area to govern. In such smallness, greatness resides. Counterintuitive as that may sound, didn’t Greece and Italy have their Golden Ages when they were divided into countless city-states? Not a coincidence, according to Kohr: smaller states produce more culture, wealth and happiness.

It might be easy to confine Kohr’s non-violent anarchism to the salon, where, over a fine glass of sherry, quixotic ideas may be lofted and shot down like intellectual clay pigeons. But he thought his gradualist approach eminently practicable, and tried to put it to good use in the field.

During his long career, Kohr supported the independence movements of Puerto Rico, Wales and Anguilla [8], and opposed grand unification projects like the European Union. He appealed for the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, long before they happened. And he publicized his ideas about how such small states should be formed and governed. He even devised a concrete upper limit for “smallness”: “The absolute maximum to which a society can expand without having its basic functions degrade, is about 12 to 15 million people.”

The answer was “not union, but division”: in a world where companies merge into megacorporations and countries into unaccountable supra-states, Kohr’s vision is both counterintuitive and refreshing. One of his 10 basic laws is the so-called Beanstalk Principle: For every animal, object, institution or system, there is an optimal limit beyond which it ought not to grow.

via Kohr Principles – NYTimes.com.

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