Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.
Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings.
Why is Haiti so poor? Is it because Haitians are dimwitted or incapable of getting their act together?
Haiti isn’t impoverished because the devil got his due; it’s impoverished partly because of debts due. France imposed a huge debt that strangled Haiti. And when foreigners weren’t looting Haiti, its own rulers were.
The greatest predation was the deforestation of Haiti, so that only 2 percent of the country is forested today. Some trees have been — and continue to be — cut by local peasants, but many were destroyed either by foreigners or to pay off debts to foreigners. Last year, I drove across the island of Hispaniola, and it was surreal: You traverse what in places is a Haitian moonscape until you reach the border with the Dominican Republic — and jungle.
Without trees, Haiti lost its topsoil through erosion, crippling agriculture.
To visit Haiti is to know that its problem isn’t its people. They are its treasure — smart, industrious and hospitable — and Haitians tend to be successful in the United States (and everywhere but in Haiti).
Can our billions in aid to Haitians accomplish anything? After all, a Wall Street Journal column argues, “To help Haiti, end foreign aid.”
First, don’t exaggerate how much we give or they get.
Haiti ranks 42nd among poor countries in worldwide aid received per person ($103 in 2008, more than one-quarter of which comes from the United States). David Roodman of the Center for Global Development calculates that in 2008, official American aid to Haiti amounted to 92 cents per American.
The United States gives more to Haiti than any other country. But it ranks 11th in per capita giving. Canadians give five times as much per person as we do.
As for whether aid promotes economic growth, that’s a bitter and unresolved argument. But even the leading critics of aid — William Easterly, a New York University economist, and Dambisa Moyo, a banker turned author — believe in assisting Haiti after the earthquake.
“I think we have a moral imperative,” Ms. Moyo told me. “I do believe the international community should act.”
Likewise, Professor Easterly said: “Of course, I am in favor of aid to Haiti earthquake victims!”
So, is Haiti hopeless? Is Bill O’Reilly right? He said: “Once again, we will do more than anyone else on the planet, and one year from today Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now.”
No, he’s not right. And this is the most pernicious myth of all. In fact, Haiti in recent years has been much better managed under President René Préval and has shown signs of being on the mend.
Far more than most other impoverished countries — particularly those in Africa — Haiti could plausibly turn itself around. It has an excellent geographic location, there are no regional wars, and it could boom if it could just export to the American market.
A report for the United Nations by a prominent British economist, Paul Collier, outlined the best strategy for Haiti: building garment factories. That idea (sweatshops!) may sound horrific to Americans. But it’s a strategy that has worked for other countries, such as Bangladesh, and Haitians in the slums would tell you that their most fervent wish is for jobs. A few dozen major shirt factories could be transformational for Haiti.
So in the coming months as we help Haitians rebuild, let’s dispatch not only aid workers, but also business investors. Haiti desperately needs new schools and hospitals, but also new factories.
And let’s challenge the myth that because Haiti has been poor, it always will be. That kind of self-fulfilling fatalism may be the biggest threat of all to Haiti, the real pact with the devil.
Authentic 5 1/2 x 7 Kodak. I have a Rare authentic photo of Bradley Nowell and Sublime. In the photo is Brad, Eric and Bud of Sublime. They are hanging out in the basement after a show. Brad is looking directly at the camera smiling, sitting on the couch. Bud is taking a nap on the couch behind Brad and Eric is sitting in a chair talking. On the wall behind Brad, written in black majic marker graffitti style is written "SUBLIME". It was taken by a friend of mine who knew them personally. Call for more infromation if needed. 215-536-1273. Must see to believe. Serious inquiries only!
One of the Japanese whaling ships rammed and eventually sank a Sea Shepherd boat:
SYDNEY - The high-tech anti-whaling boat damaged in a collision with a Japanese whaler sank off Antarctica on Friday, but posed no threat to the pristine environment, a conservation group said.
The bow of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's Ady Gil was sheared off Wednesday in a collision with a far larger Japanese whaling ship, in the most serious clash in what has become an annual confrontation off the frozen continent.
The whaler, Shonan Maru No. 2, suffered no apparent damage. Both sides blame the other for the collision, which occurred as the Ady Gil harassed the Japanese fleet.
No, it's not the same thing, as the Japanese ships are engaged in poaching. They are not only hunting in violation of international law, but they also do much of their hunting in a whale sanctuary:
Japan kills about 1,200 whales a year in Antarctica under what it says is a scientific program allowed by the International Whaling Commission despite a moratorium on commercial whaling. Critics say the program is a front for illegal whaling, and Sea Shepherd sends ships to Antarctica each season to try to stop the hunt — an effort portrayed on the Animal Planet TV series "Whale Wars."
The whaling is conducted in international waters, but usually within the huge patch of ocean that is designated Australia's maritime rescue zone and that Canberra considers a whale sanctuary.
The last country to carry out such a rapid nuclear expansion was the United States in the 1970s, in a binge of reactor construction that ended with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. And China is placing many of its nuclear plants near large cities, potentially exposing tens of millions of people to radiation in the event of an accident.
New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore said Monday at the U.N. climate conference. This new projection, following several years of dramatic retreat by polar sea ice, suggests that the ice cap may nearly vanish in the summer much sooner than the year 2030, as was forecast by a U.S. government agency eight months ago.
Backyard poultry flocks are growing in popularity all over the U.S. as more and more people decide to try their hand at raising chickens in their urban or suburban yards. Hobbyists may be hoping to cultivate their own local sources of fresh eggs, but animal sanctuaries nationwide are witnessing another product of this trend: homeless, mistreated and neglected animals. Farm Sanctuary has always received calls asking us to take in unwanted chickens, especially roosters, but recently the number of requests to place roosters has been on the rise. There are roosters wandering city streets, roosters stranded in the suburbs, roosters left at shelters across the country – all castoffs of the backyard flock trend and most with no prospects of reaching safe homes.
Compared to the factory farming system that produces most U.S. eggs, backyard raising may seem idyllic, but the practice is generally far from humane. Animal welfare abuses often start at birth for the birds involved. In fact, most chicks purchased by backyard raisers are born in the same sort of facilities as those slated for battery cages: large, industrial hatcheries.
Ideal Hatchery, just one facility of the many, touts its annual sales rate of 5 million chicks. Let’s think about that number. Because roosters do not produce eggs, and because most towns that allow chickens exclude roosters, those who patronize these hatcheries are overwhelmingly ordering hens. Half of all chicks born, however, are roosters. This means that, for 5 million chicks sold, another 5 million are either killed at the hatchery – often ground up alive – or used as "packing material." The majority of hatcheries pack male chicks to cushion the females who have actually been ordered, and customers therefore end up with unwanted roosters who are also often illegal for people to have in their communities. Large numbers of these roosters are dumped at municipal shelters, which are unequipped to handle the birds and usually either euthanize them or send them to farms. Others may end up at live markets, which are becoming increasingly crowded with roosters.
Whether male or female, all chicks sold by hatcheries to homes and feed stores are subjected to a harrowing journey. At one day old, they are shipped through the mail. Industry group Bird Shippers of America has their own lobby team working tirelessly to protect the right of its members to ship these fragile, young animals in this way. The group claims to follow self-imposed regulations that protect the birds, but we have seen evidence much to the contrary.
Fennel, one of our most popular roosters, was among many male chicks shipped from Iowa to Pennsylvania with 100 Jersey giant hens, packed around the females to keep them safe and sound. As we so often see, this strategy failed disastrously. The birds were not retrieved from the post office the day they arrived and so were scheduled to be shipped within 48 hours back to the hatchery – a trip they would never have survived. When a postal worker looked inside the box, he found that more than half the birds had already perished. The kind man called his local SPCA, who then called us. The box, clearly marked as containing 50 white jersey giant hens and 50 black jersey giant hens, contained 53 live chicks and 77 dead ones. The 30 extra were roosters. Of the fluffy peeps who were still alive, 25 grew into hens and 28 into roosters – "packing material" surviving the shipping at a higher rate than the actual "product." This is only one of many stories that every shelter that deals with birds could tell. Fennel and the other surviving chicks were lucky to be discovered by someone who cared enough to find refuge for them. Here with us, their amazing personalities can shine through, and they can educate so many people about the suffering behind backyard flocks – a very high price to pay for fresh eggs.
A coalition of sanctuaries, all of us seeing the consequences of the urban chicken trend, got together and wrote up our position on the issue. If your town is considering allowing residents to raise chickens for eggs, or for meat, please discourage this move by sharing our statement with your community and with town officials.
God, are people sick.
The Interior Department now manages about 56 million acres of Indian trust land scattered across the country, with the heaviest concentration in Western states. The government handles leases on the land for mining, livestock grazing, timber harvesting and drilling for oil and gas. It then distributes the revenue raised by those leases to the American Indians. In the 2009 fiscal year, it collected about $298 million for more than 384,000 individual Indian accounts.
The lawsuit accuses the federal government of mismanaging that money. As a result, the value of the trusts has been unclear, and the Indians contend that they are owed far more than what they have been paid.
President Obama hailed the agreement as an “important step towards a sincere reconciliation” between the federal government and American Indians, many of whom, he said, considered the protracted lawsuit a “stain” on the nation.
In 1988, the film “Rain Man,” about an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman, shed a humane light on the travails of autism while revealing the extraordinary powers of memory that a small number of otherwise mentally disabled people possess, ostensibly as a side effect of their disability.
The film won four Oscars, including best picture, best actor and, for Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass, best original screenplay. But it never would have been made if Mr. Morrow had not had a chance meeting with Kim Peek, who inspired him to write the film.
Mr. Peek was not autistic — not all savants are autistic and not all autistics are savants — but he was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination and made ordinary reasoning difficult. He could not dress himself or brush his teeth without help. He found metaphoric language incomprehensible and conceptualization baffling.
But with an astonishing skill that allowed him to read facing pages of a book at once — one with each eye — he read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read.
Shit like that amazes me to no end. It's so crazy the capabilities human minds have, and how rarely we see them manifested. It's people like Kim Peek who show us that we know almost nothing about intelligence and brain functionality. No one can explain why or how he can do what he did. Incredible.
Basics
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence.
In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”
But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.
When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.
“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.
Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California, Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response. We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.
“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.
Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.
Enemies of the plant’s enemies are not the only ones to tune into the emergency broadcast. “Some of these cues, some of these volatiles that are released when a focal plant is damaged,” said Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis, “cause other plants of the same species, or even of another species, to likewise become more resistant to herbivores.”
Yes, it’s best to nip trouble in the bud.
Dr. Hilker and her colleagues, as well as other research teams, have found that certain plants can sense when insect eggs have been deposited on their leaves and will act immediately to rid themselves of the incubating menace. They may sprout carpets of tumorlike neoplasms to knock the eggs off, or secrete ovicides to kill them, or sound the S O S. Reporting in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Hilker and her coworkers determined that when a female cabbage butterfly lays her eggs on a brussels sprout plant and attaches her treasures to the leaves with tiny dabs of glue, the vigilant vegetable detects the presence of a simple additive in the glue, benzyl cyanide. Cued by the additive, the plant swiftly alters the chemistry of its leaf surface to beckon female parasitic wasps. Spying the anchored bounty, the female wasps in turn inject their eggs inside, the gestating wasps feed on the gestating butterflies, and the plant’s problem is solved.
Here’s the lurid Edgar Allan Poetry of it: that benzyl cyanide tip-off had been donated to the female butterfly by the male during mating. “It’s an anti-aphrodisiac pheromone, so that the female wouldn’t mate anymore,” Dr. Hilker said. “The male is trying to ensure his paternity, but he ends up endangering his own offspring.”
Plants eavesdrop on one another benignly and malignly. As they described in Science and other journals, Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues have discovered that seedlings of the dodder plant, a parasitic weed related to morning glory, can detect volatile chemicals released by potential host plants like the tomato. The young dodder then grows inexorably toward the host, until it can encircle the victim’s stem and begin sucking the life phloem right out of it. The parasite can even distinguish between the scents of healthier and weaker tomato plants and then head for the hale one.
“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”
It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.
China executes rogue trader, millions still missing
BEIJING (Reuters) – China on Tuesday executed a former securities trader for embezzlement, the first person in the industry to be put to death, but millions of yuan are still missing, a state newspaper said.
Yang Yanming was sentenced to death in late 2005 and took the secret of the whereabouts of 65 million yuan ($9.52 million) of the misappropriated funds to his grave, the Beijing Evening News said.
The report added that Yang was the first person working in China's securities sector to be executed.
"Preserve your moral integrity and don't set too much store by business results," Yang told the newspaper before the sentence was carried out.
He was the general manager of the Beijing securities trading department of the China Great Wall Trust and Investment Corp., which became Galaxy Securities, from 1997 to 2003.
Conscious that the growing gap between rich and poor could generate resentment, China is battling corruption and stock trading abuses. It has used the death penalty as a deterrent in serious cases.
($1=6.828 Yuan)
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie)
