what were drugs?

aeon |  When the US President Richard Nixon announced his ‘war on drugs’ in 1971, there was no need to define the enemy. He meant, as everybody knew, the type of stuff you couldn’t buy in a drugstore. Drugs were trafficked exclusively on ‘the street’, within a subculture that was immediately identifiable (and never going to vote for Nixon anyway). His declaration of war was for the benefit of the majority of voters who saw these drugs, and the people who used them, as a threat to their way of life. If any further clarification was needed, the drugs Nixon had in his sights were the kind that were illegal.

Today, such certainties seem quaint and distant. This May, the UN office on drugs and crime announced that at least 348 ‘legal highs’ are being traded on the global market, a number that dwarfs the total of illegal drugs. This loosely defined cohort of substances is no longer being passed surreptitiously among an underground network of ‘drug users’ but sold to anybody on the internet, at street markets and petrol stations. It is hardly a surprise these days when someone from any stratum of society – police chiefs, corporate executives, royalty – turns out to be a drug user. The war on drugs has conspicuously failed on its own terms: it has not reduced the prevalence of drugs in society, or the harms they cause, or the criminal economy they feed. But it has also, at a deeper level, become incoherent. What is a drug these days?

Consider, for example, the category of stimulants, into which the majority of ‘legal highs’ are bundled. In Nixon’s day there was, on the popular radar at least, only ‘speed’: amphetamine, manufactured by biker gangs for hippies and junkies. This unambiguously criminal trade still thrives, mostly in the more potent form of methamphetamine: the world knows its face from the US TV series Breaking Bad, though it is at least as prevalent these days in Prague, Bangkok or Cape Town. But there are now many stimulants whose provenance is far more ambiguous.

Pharmaceuticals such as modafinil and Adderall have become the stay-awake drugs of choice for students, shiftworkers and the jet-lagged: they can be bought without prescription via the internet, host to a vast and vigorously expanding grey zone between medical and illicit supply. Traditional stimulant plants such as khat or coca leaf remain legal and socially normalised in their places of origin, though they are banned as ‘drugs’ elsewhere. La hoja de coca no es droga! (the coca leaf is not a drug) has become the slogan behind which Andean coca-growers rally, as the UN attempts to eradicate their crops in an effort to block the global supply of cocaine. Meanwhile, caffeine has become the indispensable stimulant of modern life, freely available in concentrated forms such as double espressos and energy shots, and indeed sold legally at 100 per cent purity on the internet, with deadly consequences. ‘Legal’ and ‘illegal’ are no longer adequate terms for making sense of this hyperactive global market.

The unfortunate term ‘legal highs’ reflects this confusion. It has become a cliché to note its imprecision: most of the substances it designates are not strictly legal to sell, while at the same time it never seems to include the obvious candidates – alcohol, caffeine and nicotine. The phrase hasn’t quite outgrown its apologetic inverted commas, yet viable alternatives are thin on the ground: ‘novel psychoactive substance’ (NPS), the clunky circumlocution that is preferred in drug-policy circles, is unlikely to enter common parlance. ‘Legal highs’, for all its inaccuracies, points to a zone beyond the linguistic reach of the war on drugs, that fervid state of mind in which any separation between ‘drugs’ and ‘illegal’ seems like a contradiction in terms. Then again, if that conceptual link breaks down, what does become of the old idea of drugs? When the whiff of criminality finally disperses, what are we left with?

the great colorado social experiment

NYTimes | In January, Colorado defied the federal government and stepped with both feet into the world of legal recreational marijuana, where no state had gone before.

For seven months Coloradans have been lawfully smoking joints and inhaling cannabis vapors, chewing marijuana-laced candies and chocolates, drinking, cooking and lotioning with products infused with cannabis oil. They are growing their own weed, making their own hash oil and stocking up at dispensaries marked with green crosses and words like “health,” “wellness” and “natural remedies.” Tourists are joining in — gawking, sampling and tripping in hotel rooms. Business is growing, taxes are flowing, cannabis entrepreneurs are building, investing and cashing in.

Cannabis sales from January through May brought the state about $23.6 million in revenue from taxes, licenses and fees. That is not a huge amount in a $24 billion budget, but it’s a lot more than zero, and it’s money that was not pocketed by the black market.

The criminal justice system is righting itself. Marijuana prosecutions are way down across the state — The Denver Post found a 77 percent drop in January from the year before. Given the immense waste, in dollars and young lives, of unjust marijuana enforcement that far too often targets black men, this may be the most hopeful trend of all.

The striking thing to a visitor is how quickly the marijuana industry has receded into normality — cannabis storefronts are plentiful in Denver, but not obtrusive, certainly not in the way liquor stores often are. Marijuana-growing operations are in unmarked warehouses on the city’s industrial edges.

The ominously predicted harms from legalization — like blight, violence, soaring addiction rates and other ills — remain imaginary worries. Burglaries and robberies in Denver, in fact, are down from a year ago. The surge of investment and of jobs in construction, tourism and other industries, on the other hand, is real.

california drying: is immigration imminent?

dailyimpact |  The only category of drought higher than the one now assigned to nearly 60 percent of California (the USDA’s Drought Monitor calls it “exceptional”)  is “Biblical.” Three years in, there is no relief in sight — the much-anticipated El Nino pattern of sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, which usually increases rainfall in California, has not materialized. It would take a full year of normal rain and snowfall to restore surface waters to normal levels. A UC Davis study just out finds the amount of surface water available to California agriculture has been reduced by 6.6 million acre-feet (yes, that’s enough water to submerge 6.6 million acres to a depth of one foot). Groundwater has been pumped to replace five million acre-feet, but the shortfall remains a jaw-dropping 1.6 million acre-feet.

It is, right now, one of the worst droughts in the history of North America. Bad enough, says Lynn Wilson, chair of the School of Arts and Sciences at Kaplan University and member of a UN delegation on climate change, that “we may have to migrate people out of California.”

Which immediately led to a post on the aptly named Lunatic Outpost ( I am not making any of this up) titled “UN panel recommends moving people out of California.”  In black transport helicopters, one assumes.  (For the record: Dr. Wilson’s UN service is not her day job, and her observation had nothing to do with the UN.)

But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you might not have to leave California. “Civilizations in the past have had to migrate out of areas of drought,” says Dr. Wilson, and although heroic measures can be expected before any such decision is reached, she says, “it can’t be taken off the table.”

Ominously, heroic measures are already being taken. Californians can now be fined $500 for washing their car or watering their ornamentals. Time to move to Phoenix. Oh, wait….

"they" sure came up with a vaccine REAL quick: this doesn't end well...,

reuters |  The U.S. government will begin testing on people an experimental Ebola vaccine as early as September, after seeing positive results from tests on primates, according to media reports on Thursday.

The National Institutes of Health's infectious disease unit is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to put the vaccine into trial as quickly as possible, according to CNN and USA Today. The director of that unit could not be reached for comment. Fist tap Dale.

first "known" cases of ebola being introduced onto u.s. soil...,

abcnews |  The patients, Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, will be transported one by one, sources told ABC News today. 

There are plans to transfer one of the patients to Emory University Hospital's special facility containment unit within the next several days, hospital officials said in a statement. 

Officials said the patient will arrive in Atlanta sometime next week. Where the other patient will be taken remains unclear. 

But the risk to the wider American public remains minimal, Shaffner explained. 

"Even if a case were imported into the US -- and here we’re bringing two people for hospital care -- that actually the risk for Americans is essentially zero," he said.

urban cores teeming with contagion prior to pestilential border onslaught...,

WaPo |  John Armstrong, Florida’s top health official , sent a letter last month to the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — taking the extra step of copying the media — requesting that they tell him how many of the children who recently crossed the U.S. border from Mexico are in Florida and what illnesses they have. In asserting that this information was “urgently needed and is vital to guarding the health and safety of Florida communities, ” Armstrong fanned anxieties that the influx of children from Central and South America poses a large-scale threat to public health. 

 

Likewise, Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey, a chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus, penned a letter last month to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden requesting a national threat assessment, claiming he had heard reports of children crossing the border “carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus, and tuberculosis.” The congressman later added smallpox to his list of diseases of concern. 

Let’s everybody calm down. No one has ever been infected with Ebola in the Western Hemisphere, dengue fever isn’t transmitted from human to human, only one confirmed case of flu has been found so far among the children and smallpox has been eradicated worldwide. 

That leaves tuberculosis, an infectious disease that actually is of great public health concern. TB is an airborne illness, caused by a bacterium that can infect any part of the body, though it typically affects the lungs. Symptoms include severe weight loss, lethargy and bloody coughing. It can be fatal without treatment.

unaccompanied illegals just crawling with disease....,

foxnews |  Unaccompanied illegal immigrant children with communicable diseases have given or exposed federal agents to lice, scabies, tuberculosis and chicken pox, according to a report issued Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

In two cases, the children of a border patrol agent got chicken pox contracted from their parents’ exposure to unaccompanied children with chicken pox, according to the report on conditions of detention centers and border facilities.

The report, the first in a series, is based on 87 unannounced visits to 63 detention centers being used to house unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in Texas, Arizona and California during July 1-16.

“Many UAC and family units require treatment for communicable diseases, including respiratory illnesses, tuberculosis, chicken pox, and scabies,” said the memorandum summarizing the report.

“UAC and family unit illnesses and unfamiliarity with bathroom facilities resulted in unsanitary conditions and exposure to human waste in some holding facilities.

“DHS employees reported exposure to communicable diseases and becoming sick on duty. For example, during a recent site visit to the Del Rio USBP Station and Del Rio Port of Entry, CBP personnel reported contracting scabies, lice, and chicken pox.

“Two CBP Officers reported that their children were diagnosed with chicken pox within days of the CBP Officers' contact with a UAC who had chicken pox. In addition, USBP personnel at the Clint Station and Santa Teresa Station reported that they were potentially exposed to tuberculosis.”

Sources previously told FoxNews.com of multiple instances in which Border Patrol agents were exposed to tuberculosis—and one instance in which an agent contracted a severe case of tuberculosis from illegal immigrants in his care.

Other sources told FoxNews.com that swine flu has been found at several detention centers in Texas.

ed, feed, august in chicago sounding better by the minute about now...,

npr |  An isolation unit at Emory University's hospital in Atlanta will be used in the coming days to house and treat a patient infected with Ebola, the virus that has killed more than 700 people in a recent outbreak in West Africa.

Announcing the pending transfer of the patient Thursday, Emory, which like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is based in Atlanta, issued a statement saying it will use "a specially built isolation unit set up in collaboration with the CDC to treat patients who are exposed to certain serious infectious diseases."

The unit is one of four such facilities in America, Emory said, describing it as being "physically separate from other patient areas."

Officials at Emory University Hospital say they don't know when the patient will arrive.

They also didn't give any details about the patient — but the person being treated could be an American who was infected with Ebola while working in Africa, according to a that cites an anonymous source as saying a charter plane has been sent from Georgia to retrieve two patients.

As NPR reported this week, are among three Americans who contracted the disease while working with the charity Samaritan's Purse. CNN says at least one of the two (the third patient has died) could be taken to the Emory facility.

Health experts are calling this Ebola outbreak large, complex, and difficult — and it still hasn't slowed down.

"In only four days, the total number of cases has risen by 122, or about 10 percent," NPR's global development blog said of the Ebola outbreak today.

On Thursday, the CDC issued an advisory against non-essential travel to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, urging Americans to avoid potential exposure to the disease in West Africa.

doctors told to prepare for global outbreak after victim was allowed on two planes...,

Victim: Mr Sawyer, with one of his children, died from Ebola in West Africa

mirror |  Doctors fear Ebola victim Patrick Sawyer may have sparked a worldwide spread of the killer disease after being allowed on two flights while infected.

And tonight a desperate race was on to find dozens of passengers who flew on the same jets as the 40-year-old American.

British doctors and border officials have been warned to be on the lookout for people in the UK showing signs of the disease.

Mr Sawyer was allowed to board an ASKY Airlines flight in Liberia, where Ebola is rife, despite vomiting and suffering from ­diarrhoea. His sister was recently killed by the virus.

He had a stopover in Ghana then changed planes in Togo and flew to the international travel hub of Lagos in Nigeria. The dad-of-three died five days after arriving in the city.

Lancaster University virologist Derek ­Gatherer said passengers, crew and airport ground staff who came into contact with Mr Sawyer could be in “pretty serious danger”. Ebola is fatal in 90% of cases.

Doctors have identified 59 people who were near him and have tested 20. But they are struggling to find the others, who could have flown to anywhere in the world from Lagos.

Update: Doctors are reportedly investigating the first possible case of the Ebola virus in Hong Kong. A man has also been tested at a hospital in Birmingham and has been given the all clear. Get latest news in our live coverage and on our dedicated page.

There were today questions over how Liberian government worker Mr Sawyer was let on flights while clearly showing symptoms of Ebola – which has killed 672 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone since it broke out in February.

ebola in west africa: the outbreak country by country

guardian |  The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus currently sweeping through parts of west Africa has so far killed an estimated 673 people. As of 23 July there had been a total of 1,202 confirmed, probable or suspected infections

what happens when digital cities are abandoned?

theatlantic |  People use terms like “majestic,” “spectacularly vacant,” and “post-apocalyptic” to describe real-life ruins. There’s an entire subculture around images of once-splendid buildings, now left to rot and decay. I’m a quiet fan of these urban explorers, people who devote time to poking around abandoned buildings or “haikyo”—and, if they’re lucky, uncovering stories about the people that once resided there. And because I’ve spent so much time inhabiting digital rooms myself, I often think about how time decays digital structures. I imagine all of the strings of text that have come before or after mine that similarly disappeared into the void. But what happens when those spaces stick around, as in a virtual world—when they can’t physically decay?

When Second Life launched in 2003, the world was captivated by visions of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash come to life. The virtual world isn’t a game--it’s a venue, a platform, a plot of undeveloped land, a blank canvas, an open world. Users make of it what they will.

In 2006, an avatar was featured on the cover of Business Week magazine as part of an interview about a million-dollar land management business. People were swept up in a great wave of excitement and possibility. Universities and corporations flocked to build huge structures, including full-size stadiums and digital recreations of their real-life buildings.

 

But that was nearly 10 years ago. I wondered: what happened to all of those buildings? Were people still making use of them? So I logged in. The world of Second Life, it turns out, is not abandoned. Estimates put the current active user-base around 600,000 members; in its heyday, it boasted between 60 and 80 thousand simultaneous logins. There are often a handful of people in most of the spaces you’ll visit, but it’s easy to find privacy. Here and there are signs that point to its lack of people: “space for rent”, “band wanted.” But the sheer variety of environments, and the obvious care that people put into them, remains stunning.

There are moments in Second Life where the artifice is obvious. Not just when it’s loading, building up the world from flat planes to polygons to intricate, textured shapes—but when you realize that everything is pristine, unlike real-world counterparts. It brings to mind the words of Philip K. Dick describing the detritus that’s started taking over the largely-abandoned cities in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

There’s no kipple in Second Life; no tumbling, ivy-covered walls, or pools of stagnant water, no gum wrappers or cigarette cartons slowly disintegrating. 

Removed from organic decaying processes, the only ruins in this world, including simulacrum of piles of dirt and construction vehicles, are ones that have been deliberately built and placed there by a designer. But despite its empty spaces, the world still feels full of possibility, perhaps specifically because it’s all still standing strong, so many years on. It’s not abandoned; it’s simply waiting.

where online services go when they die...,

theatlantic |  Michael Doino approached the late hours of October 1, 1999, with a lingering sense of dread.  It was finally time, after 11 years, to pull the plug on Prodigy Classic, a commercial online service he had helped shepherd from a plucky upstart into a nationwide giant.

"It was very bittersweet, very sad," recalls Doino, a veteran project manager at the company. "I had been there before the Prodigy service went live."

Some time before midnight, Doino logged into the main Prodigy Classic server and, as instructed, uploaded a file to redirect Prodigy Classic users to the company's newer Prodigy Internet service.  At that moment, the written record of a massive, unique online culture, including millions of messages and tens of thousands of hand-drawn pieces of digital art, seemingly vanished into thin air.

It had no where to go but away. That data was never on the Internet; it existed in a proprietary format on a proprietary network, far out of reach from the technological layman.  It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords.

Fifteen years later, a Prodigy enthusiast named Jim Carpenter has found an ingenious way to bring some of that data back from the dead. With a little bit of Python code and some old Prodigy software at hand, Carpenter, working alone, recently managed to partially reverse-engineer the Prodigy client and eke out some Prodigy content that was formerly thought to have been lost forever.

"Honestly, I wasn't a huge fan of Prodigy," says Carpenter, a 38 year-old freelance programmer based in Massachusetts, recalling his time on the service around the turn of the 1990s. "I had already been using the Internet for a couple of years and Prodigy seemed so closed in. But I still used Prodigy every single day. It was the graphics."

It was Carpenter's drive to see those graphics once again that got him fiddling with Prodigy clients in late 2012. "Finding decent color screen shots of Prodigy is nearly impossible," says Carpenter.

He knew the sign-on screen was stored on the hard drive, so he began to wonder what else he might find in the client software. Using a hex editor, Carpenter fiddled with the client software until he found even more graphical data. "As far as I knew, the only thing I might be able to get is a screenshot of the set-up options dialog."

And he did.  But what he found next blew his mind.

urban density applied intensity: future time orientation exemplified

Ed Dunn's Global Urban Collective

suburbs will die: the most spectacular future time orientation failure in human history...,

Time |  The way suburban development usually works is that a town lays the pipes, plumbing, and infrastructure for housing development—often getting big loans from the government to do so—and soon after a developer appears and offers to build homes on it. Developers usually fund most of the cost of the infrastructure because they make their money back from the sale of the homes. The short-term cost to the city or town, therefore, is very low: it gets a cash infusion from whichever entity fronted the costs, and the city gets to keep all the revenue from property taxes. The thinking is that either taxes will cover the maintenance costs, or the city will keep growing and generate enough future cash flow to cover the obligations. But the tax revenue at low suburban densities isn’t nearly enough to pay the bills; in Marohn’s estimation, property taxes at suburban densities bring in anywhere from 4 cents to 65 cents for every dollar of liability. Most suburban municipalities, he says, are therefore unable to pay the maintenance costs of their infrastructure, let alone replace things when they inevitably wear out after twenty to twenty-five years. The only way to survive is to keep growing or take on more debt, or both. “It is a ridiculously unproductive system,” he says.

Marohn points out that while this has been an issue as long as there have been suburbs, the problem has become more acute with each additional “life cycle” of suburban infrastructure (the point at which the systems need to be replaced—funded by debt, more growth, or both). Most U.S. suburbs are now on their third life cycle, and infrastructure systems have only become more bloated, inefficient, and costly. “When people say we’re living beyond our means, they’re usually talking about a forty-inch TV instead of a twenty-inch TV,” he says. “This is like pennies compared to the dollars we’ve spent on the way we’ve arranged ourselves across the landscape.”

Marohn and his friends are not the only ones warning about the fix we’ve put ourselves in. In 2010 the financial analyst Meredith Whitney wrote a now-famous report called The Tragedy of the Commons, whose title was taken from the economic principle that individuals will act on their own self-interest and deplete a shared resource for their own benefit, even if that goes against the long-term common good. In her report, Whitney said states and municipalities were on the verge of collapse thanks in part to irresponsible spending on growth. Likening the municipalities’ finances and spending patterns to those of the banks leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, Whitney explained how spending has far outpaced revenues—some states had spent two or three times their tax receipts on everything from infrastructure to teacher salaries to libraries—all financed by borrowing from future dollars.

Marohn, too, claims we’ve tilled our land in inefficient ways we can’t afford (Whitney is one of Marohn’s personal heroes). The “suburban experiment,” as he calls it, has been a fiscal failure. On top of the issues of low-density tax collection, sprawling development is more expensive to build. Roads are wider and require more paving. Water and sewage service costs are higher. It costs more to maintain emergency services since more fire stations and police stations are needed per capita to keep response times down. Children need to be bused farther distances to school. One study by the Denver Regional Council of Governments found that conventional suburban development would cost local governments $4.3 billion more in infrastructure costs than compact, “smart” growth through 2020, only counting capital construction costs for sewer, water, and road infrastructure. A 2008 report by the University of Utah’s Arthur C. Nelson estimated that municipal service costs in low-density, sprawling locations can be as much as 2.5 times those in compact, higher-density locations.

Marohn thinks this is all just too gluttonous. “The fact that I can drive to work on paved roads where I can drive fifty-five miles an hour the minute I leave my driveway despite the fact that I won’t see another car for five miles,” he says, “is living beyond our means on a grand, grand scale.”

u.s. network infrastructure under attack: subversion of future time orientation failure?

pcworld |  Early one morning in April last year, someone accessed an underground vault just south of San Jose, California, and cut through fiber-optic cables there. The incident blacked out phone, Internet and 911 service for thousands of people in Silicon Valley.

Such incidents, often caused by vandals, seem fairly common, but exactly how often do they occur? Since 2007, the U.S. telecom infrastructure has been targeted by more than a thousand malicious acts that resulted in severe outages, according to data obtained by IDG from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FCC requires carriers to submit reports when an outage affects at least 900,000 minutes of user calls, or when it impacts 911 service, major military installations, key government facilities, nuclear power plants or major airports.

The reports themselves are confidential for national security and commercial reasons, but aggregate data provided by the FCC shows there were 1,248 incidents resulting in major outages over the last seven years.

While the data shows no clear overall trend, the years with the highest number of incidents were recent—222 outages reported in both 2011 and 2013.

For the last three years, vandalism was the single biggest cause of outages identified, accounting for just over a third of the incidents in each year.

Gun shots accounted for 9 percent of the outages in 2013, 7 percent in 2012 and 4 percent in 2011. Cable theft accounted for roughly similar levels—4 percent of outages in 2013, 8 percent in 2012 and 7 percent in 2011. The FCC didn’t list all the causes.

Two of the outages over the seven-year period were related to terrorism. Both came as a result of the Boston marathon bombing in April 2013 and apparently refer to widespread cellular outages in the hours after the attacks.

The FCC didn’t respond to several requests for comment on the data. Telecom carriers and their industry association also didn’t respond or declined to comment, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

Telecom isn’t the only infrastructure area to be targeted. Indeed, minutes after the fiber cables were cut in San Jose last year, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation in an attack some believe was terrorist-related.

Most of the incidents in the FCC’s telecom data likely have more mundane causes, such as copper cable theft, a problem carriers have discussed in the past. In 2013, Verizon twice offered rewards of $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of cable thieves who caused numerous outages in the Pittsburgh area. Carriers have been pushing state legislators to make cable theft a federal crime.

who goes dry first, vegas or phoenix?

doomsteaddiner |  The title of first American city to be abandoned for lack of water will be awarded in the next decade or so, and it’s hard to decide whether to bet on Las Vegas or Phoenix. It could be a tie. Those among us who still like our stories to end with a moral are rooting for Vegas, whose demise would round out a lovely wages-of-sin, Sodom-and-Gomorrah kind of fable. Phoenix seems less blameworthy, but only if you think what’s about to happen is retribution for sin. If you lean more toward the inevitable-consequences-of-stupidity theory, then there’s not much to differentiate between Dumb Phoenix and Dumber Las Vegas.In Vegas, “the situation is as bad as you can imagine,” according to climate scientist Tim Barnett at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Vegas gets its water from Lake Mead, impounded by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Lake Mead is less than half half full, and is dropping fast, probably by another 20 feet this year. It is lower now than it ever has been since the lake was filled in 1938. Another 37 feet and the Las Vegas intake pipe will be sucking air. (All this was updated thoroughly last week in the London Telegraph. Why are the best stories about America’s environmental problems found in British newspapers?)

Not to worry, there’s another water intake for Las Vegas, 50 feet below the present one. Oh, good, two more years. Assuming drought conditions get no worse than they are now, and that is far from a safe assumption. Then what? Vegas has a plan. A boring machine the size of the Pentagon is chewing through solid rock at the rate of one inch a day to punch a line through to the very deepmost bottom of Lake Meade. Another few years, if they make it in time. The country can’t find the money to fix its roads and bridges, but it found $817 million to keep Las Vegas in flushing water for a few more years.

Then what? According to Rob Mrowka, a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, “As the water situation becomes more dire we are going to start having to talk about the removal of people (from Las Vegas).”  

Who else gets half its water from the very same lake Mead on the very same Colorado River? 

Phoenix, Arizona, that’s who. A city that has been in drought conditions for ten years and is expected to remain so for another 20 or 30 years. (To say that Vegas is in a 14-year drought is redundant. It’s in a desert. Four inches of rain a year is normal.) Yet until two weeks ago, no one had told Phoenix, officially, that unless there are substantial (and unexpected) improvements in the flows of the Colorado River and the level of Lake Mead and Lake Powell farther upstream, deliveries of water to Phoenix are going to be curtailed.

Now the Central Arizona Project, which manages the lower Colorado watershed, has said exactly that. “We’re dealing with a very serious issue,” board member Sharon Megdal told the New York Times, “and people need to pay attention to it.”

In other words — Brace for Impact.

satellite study reveals parched u.s. west using up underground water

The Colorado River Basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet of freshwater over the past nine years, according to a new study based on data from NASA’s GRACE mission. This is almost double the volume of the nation’s largest reservoir, Nevada’s Lake Mead (pictured). Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

agu |  A new study finds more than 75 percent of the water loss in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin since late 2004 came from underground resources. The extent of groundwater loss may pose a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought.

This study is the first to quantify the amount that groundwater contributes to the water needs of western states. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water management agency, the basin has been suffering from prolonged, severe drought since 2000 and has experienced the driest 14-year period in the last hundred years. The study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, which posted the manuscript online today.

The research team, led by NASA and University of California, Irvine, scientists, used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission to track changes in the mass of the Colorado River Basin, which are related to changes in water amount on and below the surface. Monthly measurements of the change in water mass from December 2004 to November 2013 revealed the basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet (65 cubic kilometers) of freshwater, almost double the volume of the nation’s largest reservoir, Nevada’s Lake Mead. More than three-quarters of the total — about 41 million acre feet (50 cubic kilometers) — was from groundwater.

“We don’t know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don’t know when we’re going to run out,” said Stephanie Castle, a water resources specialist at the University of California, Irvine, and the study’s lead author. “This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking.”

Water above ground in the basin’s rivers and lakes is managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and its losses are documented. Pumping from underground aquifers is regulated by individual states and is often not well documented.

“There’s only one way to put together a very large-area study like this, and that is with satellites,” said senior author Jay Famiglietti, senior water cycle scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, on leave from UC Irvine, where he is an Earth system science professor. “There’s just not enough information available from well data to put together a consistent, basin-wide picture.”

Famiglietti said GRACE is like having a giant scale in the sky. Within a given region, the change in mass due to rising or falling water reserves influences the strength of the local gravitational attraction. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE reveals how much a region’s water storage changes over time.

The Colorado River is the only major river in the southwestern United States. Its basin supplies water to about 40 million people in seven states, as well as irrigating roughly four million acres of farmland.  Fist tap Dale.

the government rulebook for labelling you a "terrorist"

firstlook |  The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.

The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place entire “categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.

Over the years, the Obama and Bush Administrations have fiercely resisted disclosing the criteria for placing names on the databases—though the guidelines are officially labeled as unclassified. In May, Attorney General Eric Holder even invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent watchlisting guidelines from being disclosed in litigation launched by an American who was on the no fly list. In an affidavit, Holder called them a “clear roadmap” to the government’s terrorist-tracking apparatus, adding: “The Watchlisting Guidance, although unclassified, contains national security information that, if disclosed … could cause significant harm to national security.”

thirsty in the detroit littoral: writing off the future of a large part of humanity...,

ragblog |  What are Obama’s drones except a robotized version of the Phoenix program?

Tom may also be prescient in implying that the current celebrity of the unorthodox ‘warrior thinker’ – whether personified by Kilcullen or the sinister General McMasters – doesn’t necessarily put any new ideas on the empire’s table. But Down from the Hills – and this why I blurbed it – does register with stark honesty a global reality that foreign policy mandarins have generally ignored: the consequences of warehousing a billion poor people in peripheral slums with negligible hope of ever finding employment in the formal world economy.

An agricultural ‘apocalypse’ (and here the term is accurate) has driven hundreds of millions into cities where, apart from the world factory of China and its periphery, capitalism no longer creates jobs or rewards education. Moreover, economic globalization, as it were, has ‘leaked space.’ Without an international red menace incubating in the slums, governments have often abdicated everything except police violence and extortion in their poorest and most rapidly growing urban districts.

Into this “vacuum” of governability, Kilcullen claims, has rushed a motley mob of terrorist militias and super-street gangs who have transformed the despair of the young into a new strategic weapon: suicide bombers. A chief architect of counter-partisan warfare in the Middle East, he now concedes that special-ops can also be a steroid to the very movements it seeks to behead. So ‘smart power’ must now pay attention to underlying causes. Indeed the analysis in his new book drives him part way into the arms of Jeffrey Sachs. (Or, more accurately, into those of Dilma Roussef, Brazil’s ex-1960s-guerrilla president, who extols the military occupation of Rio’s favelas as ‘profound reform.’)

Tom gives all this a deserving yawn: hearts and minds redux. While desperate liberals having been seeking light at the end of Obama’s tunnel, Tom has been thunderous in denouncing this scary administration’s love affair with executive immunity, special ops and universal surveillance.

But I believe if you carefully read Kilcullen and the literature coming out of places like the Naval War College (where they recently had a think-tank discussing the implications of ‘deglobalization’), you’ll come to the recognition that the Pentagon’s killing machines are not the most profound danger ahead. Rather it’s the fact that the military intellectuals are already exploring the consequences of writing off the future of a large part of humanity. They see an absolute darkness on the horizon.

During the high Cold War, of course, there was no social group or acre of sovereign land that wasn’t seen as a valuable ‘stake’ by one side or another. Ideology had to rhetorically address the condition of all humanity, whether by the promises of five-year plans or Alliances for Progress. With the collapse of the USSR, however, the ‘Free World’ became an unnecessary pretense on a planet of free markets while any vision of common humanity was abdicated to NGOs and UN speeches.

What material interest now remains in wooing the poor or helping them adapt to global warming? 

What geopolitical leverage do they possess in a world without a powerful international left?

The ultimate warning of my book Planet of Slums was about the ‘triage of humanity’ that since the 1990s had become the new unspoken framework of international politics. The greatest evil is no longer that capital exploits labor but that it expels it from the circuits of production entirely. To the extent that this surplus humanity poses no realistic threat of reorganizing society on more egalitarian principles, it’s simply a problem whose ultimate management – after the helicopter gunships and Predators – may be through pandemic disease, famine, and unnatural disaster.

In another of my fraternizations with the enemy, I had a beer with an admiral a few years ago in Coronado who wanted to pick my brain about the convergence of urban poverty and natural disaster.

He had commanded a carrier task force in the Gulf and as he put it, “my kids really didn’t like bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan. But morale soared when we provided relief after the 2004 earthquake/tsunami in Indonesia.” He emphasized that only the US Navy could bring the infrastructure of a medium-sized city (in the form of ships supplying power, medicine, supplies, helicopters, etc) to a littoral region devastated by floods or quakes. “No one else – not China, Russia, the UK or the UN – has this capability.”

“But here’s the rub,” he said, “Congress will never authorize a serious expansion of humanitarian missions, especially when we’re likely to see more Katrinas and Superstorm Sandys on our own coasts.” “So at some point,” I completed his thought, “no one would ride to the rescue.” “That’s right,” he said, “no one. And this is the kind of future that some us at Newport [Naval War College] have been trying to understand.”

doing god's work reducing surplus population

wikipedia |  Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, KCB (2 April 1807 – 19 June 1886) was a British civil servant and colonial administrator. As a young man, he worked with the colonial government in Calcutta, India; in the late 1850s and 1860s he served there in senior-level appointments.

A century and a half later, Trevelyan continues to divide opinion. It has been said that

Trevelyan's most enduring mark on history may be the quasi-genocidal anti-Irish racial sentiment [sic] he expressed during his term in the critical position of administrating relief for the millions of Irish peasants suffering under the Irish famine as Assistant Secretary to HM Treasury (1840-1859) under the Whig administration of Lord Russell.^[1]

On the other side, the BBC's Historic Figures webpage says that

His most lasting contribution, however, began in the 1850s with the publication of his and Sir Stafford Northcote's report on 'The Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service'. The report led to the transformation of the civil service. Educational standards and competitive admission examinations ensured that a more qualified body of civil servants would become administrators.^[2]

During the height of the famine it is suggested that Trevelyan deliberately dragged his feet in disbursing direct government food and monetary aid to the Irish. In a letter to Thomas Spring-Rice, Lord Mounteagle, he described the famine as an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population" as well as "the judgement of God".^[3][4][5]

His detractors complain that Trevelyan never expressed remorse for his comments, even after the full dreadful scope (approximately 1 million lives) of the Irish famine became known, while his defenders claim that other factors than Trevelyan's personal performance and beliefs were more central to the problem.

the biology of ideology

alternet |  You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, and he discussed these ideas in depth

mistreatment effects gene expression

sciencedaily |  Children who have been abused or neglected early in life are at risk for developing both emotional and physical health problems. In a new study, scientists have found that maltreatment affects the way genes are activated, which has implications for children's long-term development. Previous studies focused on how a particular child's individual characteristics and genetics interacted with that child's experiences in an effort to understand how health problems emerge. In the new study, researchers were able to measure the degree to which genes were turned "on" or "off" through a biochemical process called methylation. This new technique reveals the ways that nurture changes nature -- that is, how our social experiences can change the underlying biology of our genes.

The study, from researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, appears in the journal Child Development. Nearly 1 million children in the United States are neglected or abused every year.

The researchers found an association between the kind of parenting children had and a particular gene (called the glucocorticoid receptor gene) that's responsible for crucial aspects of social functioning and health. Not all genes are active at all times. DNA methylation is one of several biochemical mechanisms that cells use to control whether genes are turned on or off. The researchers examined DNA methylation in the blood of 56 children ages 11 to 14. Half of the children had been physically abused.

They found that compared to the children who hadn't been maltreated, the maltreated children had increased methylation on several sites of the glucocorticoid receptor gene, also known as NR3C1, echoing the findings of earlier studies of rodents. In this study, the effect occurred on the section of the gene that's critical for nerve growth factor, which is an important part of healthy brain development.

There were no differences in the genes that the children were born with, the study found; instead, the differences were seen in the extent to which the genes had been turned on or off. "This link between early life stress and changes in genes may uncover how early childhood experiences get under the skin and confer lifelong risk," notes Seth D. Pollak, professor of psychology and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who directed the study.

Previous studies have shown that children who have experienced physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect are more likely to develop mood, anxiety, and aggressive disorders, as well as to have problems regulating their emotions. These problems, in turn, can disrupt relationships and affect school performance. Maltreated children are also at risk for chronic health problems such as cardiac disease and cancer. The current study helps explain why these childhood experiences can affect health years later.

how far should society go to make sure "the least of these" get the best available treatments?

WaPo | Months before Gilead Sciences’ breakthrough hepatitis C treatment hit the market, Oregon Medicaid official Tom Burns started worrying about how the state could afford to cover every enrollee infected with the disease. He figured the cost might even reach $36,000 per patient.

Then the price for the drug was released last December: $84,000 for a 12-week treatment course.

At that price, the state would have to spend $360 million to provide its Medicaid beneficiaries with the drug called Sovaldi, just slightly less than the $377 million the Oregon Medicaid program spent on all prescription drugs for about 600,000 members in 2013. It potentially would be a backbreaker.

Faced with those steep costs, Oregon and several other states are looking to limit who has access to the drug that nearly everyone acknowledges is a revolutionary treatment for the disease affecting more than 3 million Americans.

Expensive specialty drugs aren’t new to health care. But Sovaldi stands out because it is aimed at helping millions of Americans who carry hepatitis C, and a large share of those infected are low-income and qualify for government coverage. Its arrival also coincides with the aggressive expansion of Medicaid and private coverage under the Affordable Care Act, whose purpose was to extend health care to tens of millions Americans who previously couldn’t afford it.

Sovaldi has prompted fears among insurers and state officials that the breakthrough drug, despite its benefits, could explode their budgets. And that has sparked an urgent and highly sensitive debate in Medicaid offices across the country: How far should society go to make sure the poor get the best available treatments?

the christian right's five worst "scientific" claims

salon |  Ask certain vocal members of the Christian right about science, and it won’t take you long to discover that their conception of the discipline is somewhat different from how it’s normally understood. Their version of it isn’t like the kind practiced at universities and in hospitals; it’s a special, watered-down version of science, one that adapts to fit into their biblical view of the world.

In this Christian-right version, scientific evidence is checked against the Bible and if the evidence contradicts – or at least if they believe the evidence contradicts– a single verse in a single chapter, they simply reject the evidence and the science, no questions asked. (Exhibit A: Intelligent Design.) This method of conducting science has led the Christian right to make some incredible — as in, not credible – scientific claims in the past, almost too many to document. But here are five of the most ridiculous examples of biblically informed science.

1. Aliens would go straight to hell, if they existed

You probably saw this insane story for the first time earlier this week. According to Ken Ham, the creationist most famous for losing a debate against Bill Nye the Science Guy about evolution, the space program is a useless waste of money, informed as it is by nefarious secularists who want to use science to undermine religion.

Ham doubts that aliens exist, because they are not mentioned in the Bible, but goes on to say that even if they did exist, they would totally not be worth discovering, because they would not be direct descendants of Adam, and thus would go straight to hell. Ham believes that only hard-left secularists care about finding life on other planets, and that their motivation is to create an illusion that evolution is real and disprove the Biblical accounts of creation. As he puts it:

Secularists are desperate to find life in outer space, as they believe that would provide evidence that life can evolve in different locations and given the supposed right conditions!  The search for extraterrestrial life is really driven by man’s rebellion against God in a desperate attempt to supposedly prove evolution!

Of course, among the things scientists concern themselves with, Ham’s beliefs about the exploration of space probably fall pretty low on the list. But if Ham had his way, and NASA were defunded out of existence, this is just a few of the types of inventions we might be missing out on.

the runner-up religions of america

protojournalist |  Glance at the map above, Second Largest Religious Tradition in Each State 2010, and you will see that Buddhism (orange), Judaism (pink) and Islam (blue) are the runner-up religions across the country.

No surprises there. But can you believe that Hindu (dark orange) is the No. 2 tradition in Arizona and Delaware, and that Baha'i (green) ranks second in South Carolina?

The map — created by the and published recently in — "looks very odd to me," says Hillary Kaell. She is a professor at in Montreal who specializes in North American Christianity. "These numbers, although they look impressive when laid out in the map, represent a very tiny fraction of the population in any of the states listed."

True that. Christianity is the Number One religious tradition across the board. A showed that 77 percent of Americans identify as Christians. But a deeper look into the stories behind the map's data reveal a bit more about a nation in flux.

Faith And Race In South Carolina

Louis E. Venters, an assistant professor of history at and author of the forthcoming book Most Great Reconstruction: The Baha'i Faith and Interracial Community in Jim Crow South Carolina, makes an observation similar to Hillary's. "To put the map in context," he says, "let's acknowledge at the outset that it doesn't take very much to be the second-largest religion in South Carolina. It is a solidly Christian, and particularly Protestant, state, and all the minority religions combined comprise only a tiny fraction of the population."

But, Louis says, "whatever the size of the Baha'i faith in South Carolina — relative to other minority religions — I think its history is quite compelling and worthy of attention in itself."

From as far back as 1910, Louis says, "the Baha'is were virtually unique in Jim Crow South Carolina in attempting to create an interracial religious community — for which they suffered harassment and violence."

By the 1960s, he says, there were local Baha'i organizations in many towns in north Georgia and South Carolina. The tradition spread. "The Louis G. Gregory Baha'i Institute in Georgetown County, founded in 1972 and named for the black Charleston native who first brought the religion to South Carolina," says Louis, "became a cultural and educational hub for the South Carolina movement. And Radio Baha'i WLGI — broadcasting from the same site beginning in 1985 — has brought its teachings and ethos to a large section of the state."

 The story of Louis Gregory and his wife, Louisa, is chronicled by PBS in . In 2003, the Baha'i community designated Louis Gregory's childhood home as a museum.

Louis Venters says, "The Baha'i community today is relatively well-known in South Carolina for its long record of interracialism, strong attention to community service and the education of children and youth of all backgrounds, and contributions to interfaith dialogue."

He adds: "Although the map may have come as a surprise to those who aren't familiar with this history, to me — and I think to most Baha'is in South Carolina — it makes pretty good sense. And if it brings to light one of the South's oldest and most successful experiments in interracial community-building, so much the better."

tossing bd an expensive prr bone: current opinion in neurobiology communication and language issue

sciencedirect |  Communication and language - Edited by Michael Brainard and Tecumseh Fitch

1. • Communication about social status

     Review Article
   • Pages 1-4
   • Russell D Fernald
   • • Abstract
     •  Purchase PDF - $35.95
   •  Not entitled to full text
2. • The evolution of language from social cognition

     Review Article
   • Pages 5-9
   • Robert M Seyfarth, Dorothy L Cheney
   • • Abstract
     • Close research highlights
     •  Purchase PDF - $35.95

     Highlights

     • Language and primate communication share many neural mechanisms and social functions.
     • Like humans, primates use vocalizations to facilitate social interactions
     • Call meaning depends on call type, caller ID, kinship, rank, and prior behavior.
     • Primate communication constitutes a discrete, combinatorial, and open-ended system.
     • When language first evolved, many of its distinctive features were already present.

citing drudge, big don says that dogs and chimps have language...,

cbslocal |  Dr. Greg Berns of Emory University wants to prove that a dog really does understand what its owner is saying to them.

“The more I study dogs and the more I study their brains, the more similarities I see to human brains,” Berns told WGCL-TV. “They are intelligent, they are emotional, and they’ve been ignored in terms of research and understanding how they think. So, we are all interested in trying to develop ways to understand how their minds work.”

Berns uses an MRI to test a dog’s brain.

“So, we’ve done experiments where we present odors to the dogs and these are things like the scent of other people in their house, the scent of other dogs in the house, as well as strange people and strange dogs,” Berns said. “And so what we found in that experiment is that the dogs reward processing center, so basically the part of the brain that is kind of the positive anticipation of things responds particularly strongly to the scent of their human.”

Berns used a testing center in Sandy Springs for the evaluation process. People brought their dogs for the testing.

“They need to be diligent with their homework,” Berns told WGCL. “They need to be diligent with their rapport with their dogs and the right rappart.”

Berns put the dogs through a set of training sessions, which included climbing steps, walking up and down narrow pathways, entering and remaining in an enclosure, and loud sounds of various pitches. Fist tap Big Don.