Monthly Archives: October 2017

Powerful

I don’t watch TV news, so I only saw this ad when Digby blogged it.

Powerful stuff. Here’s Wikipedia’s article on Tom Steyer if you want to know more about him.

Posted in The Resistance, The Scandals | Comments Off on Powerful

Frankly, My Dear, That’s a Tell

Based on several years’ observation, I’ve come to believe that when an elected or appointed official says “frankly” in a sentence, all the rest of it is either false, or so suffused with spin as to be as good as false.

This rule is, unfortunately, bipartisan. Try it for yourself as you read or hear the news, you’ll see…

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on Frankly, My Dear, That’s a Tell

This Could Happen to You

…if you are a litigator taking a deposition (dramatization via NYT, ‘Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier?’).

Posted in Law: Practice | Comments Off on This Could Happen to You

These Are the Good Old Days?

Or will be if the gloomdogglers are right about the environment,

This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.

One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.

And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.

The impact on wildlife of changes in farming practice (and the expansion of the farmed area) is so rapid and severe that it is hard to get your head round the scale of what is happening.

It all sounds dreadful. Of course historically technical change and market forces overwhelmed Malthusian effects, so it’s possible that late capitalism still has rabbits in the hat….

Posted in Global Warming, Science/Medicine | 1 Comment

Latvian ‘Ocean’

My article Flood Control on the Information Ocean: Living With Anonymity, Digital Cash, and Distributed Databases has been translated into Latvian as “Plūdu kontroli par informāciju, kas okeānā: dzīvo ar anonimitāti, digitālās naudas, un sadalītās datu bāzes” by Arija Liepkalnietis.

Thank you Ms. Liepkalnietis! (But please add a Creative Commons License.)

Posted in Writings | Comments Off on Latvian ‘Ocean’

ACLU Brings Important Freedom-to-Travel Lawsuit

The ACLU’s blog post is actually not over the top here: We’re Suing the Government for Violating the Rights of Passengers on Delta Airlines 1583 in Police-State Fashion.

The full complaint in Amedei v. Duke is online.

Some key bits below the fold: Continue reading

Posted in Civil Liberties, ID Cards and Identification, Law: Right to Travel | Comments Off on ACLU Brings Important Freedom-to-Travel Lawsuit