Puck

Andrew Revkin has been writing about environmentalism’s elephant in the room — population:

Discussions of food policy, climate change, international security and many other global issues often take place in isolation, cut off from consideration of other factors delineating the pinch points as humanity’s population and appetites crest in the next couple of generations.

via Feeding Fewer Than 9 Billion – Dot Earth Blog – NYTimes.com.

This comes from the latest Harper’s email. If stripped of U.S. citizenship, I wonder then what happens? Are you kicked out of the country? Rendered with extreme prejudice to Syria? Does anybody know?

Senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Scott Brown of Massachusetts proposed a bill to allow the State Department to strip Americans of their citizenship if there is evidence that they support terrorism. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the measure, and House speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed with its “spirit.”

The New York Times has more details but no answers to my questions.

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

via NCLR: issues & cases > case docket > greene v. county of sonoma et al. See also Dan Savage’s column in today’s Stranger and President Obama’s request last week that the “Department of Health and Human Services…  establish a rule that would prevent hospitals from denying visitation privileges to gay and lesbian partners.”

Apparently, this all took place in Sonoma County. Read the rest of this entry »

On the day that Goldman Sachs’ deliberate fraud became known, betting against its own shareholders in a scheme that greatly contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown, the Republicans announced that they will collectively prevent the Wall Street Reform bill from coming to the floor for debate. They say the bill is a bailout. It’s not. It is a bill that would help prevent exactly the type of fraud perpetrated by Goldman Sachs against the American taxpayer. It should now be clear who the Republicans are working for.

Climate is not weather and the group that seizes the story first is bound to control it best and longest. A sad but true rule of PR.

A panel of eminent U.S. and European scientists has confirmed the widespread scientific consensus that the Earth's climate is warming due to human activities, but said they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news of an error in a major climate report and hacked researcher e-mails.

In a symposium Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Science, AAAS, the scientific leaders acknowledged errors in a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and possibly impolitic email exchanges by East Anglian University climate researchers.

But they expressed shock at the political effects of the disclosures and said the impact was far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate.

via Top Scientists Affirm Consensus on Global Warming.

They expressed shock? Shock!? Sheeze…. Scientists and children….

Sez Cory Doctorow:

Italy’s Berlusconi regime, already known around the world as an enemy of free speech and popular access to the tools of communication, has now floated a proposal to require Italians to get an “uploader’s license” in order to put any “moving pictures” on the Internet. The government claims that this is required as part of the EU’s product placement disclosure rules, which is about as ridiculous assertion as I’ve heard this month.

via Italy proposes mandatory licenses for people who upload video Boing Boing.

Washington state House lawmakers will hear testimony at 1:30pm [Jan. 13] in favor of a pair of bills seeking to significantly reduce state marijuana penalties. Members of the House Committee on Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness will debate two pending proposals, House Bill 1177 and House Bill 2401. House Bill 1177 seeks to reclassify the possession of forty grams or less of marijuana from a misdemeanor to a class 2 civil infraction punishable by a $100 fine. House Bill 2401 seeks to “remove all existing civil and criminal penalties for adults 21 years of age or older who cultivate, possess, transport, sell, or use marijuana.” This will be the first time state lawmakers have ever debated regulating marijuana production, distribution, and use by adults.

NORML representatives will be testifying in Olympia on Wednesday (Read testimony here.), and NORML Advisory Board member Rick Steves will also be hosting a public forum on the topic at Olympia’s Capitol Theater on Tuesday evening. If you live in Washington, you can urge the Committee to vote ‘yes’ on one or both of these measures by going here and here.

via Coming To A State House Near You: Legal Cannabis? | NORML Blog.

In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia's coast and scooped up the ocean's contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.

“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association.

via Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish.

Over on High Country News, Kitty Benzar reports that the U.S. Forest Service, caving to its subcontrators, has proposed

to eliminate the 50 percent discount at national forest campgrounds that has been available since 1965 to holders of lifetime senior and access passes.

Seems there are just too many of us getting old and staying outdoor. That’s a good thing, right? The thing most folks don’t realize is that most national parks, and especially camp grounds, are managed by private companies.

Contracting out their management may be a convenience for the agency, but it’s little benefit for the visitor. For the public, it shouldn’t matter who’s cleaning the toilets or emptying the trash, as  long as the work’s being done.

Well, not quite: subcontrators can do the work cheaper than the Forest Service because non-government employees can be paid drastically less. Given that, though, Benzar’s point stands: it looks like the USFS did a bait-and-switch on existing senior-citizen passes:

The Forest Service encouraged Golden Pass holders to exchange their old passes for new ones, and many did. But pass holders were not told that when they did so they relinquished an important benefit [cheap access to parks and campgrounds]. The Forest Service claims that granting the camping discount for Golden Pass holders is no longer “practicable.” Let’s call it “bait-and-switch.”

Express your opinion about the proposed change. The public can comment on these proposed changes until Feb. 1.

NORML reports this in this week’s legislative update for Washington:

Legislators have pre-filed House Bill 2401, which seeks to “remove all existing civil and criminal penalties for adults 21 years of age or older who cultivate, possess, transport, sell, or use marijuana.” You can read the full text of the proposal here, and you can show your support for the measure by going to NORML’s ‘Take Action Center’ here. (FYI: Separate decriminalization legislation also remains pending, and may be supported by going here.)

Have I mentioned recently that I think prohibition is just plain stupid? Not to mention immoral and expensive….