legalization on the ballot in california

SFGate| A decision by California to legalize pot could lend momentum to the entire legalization movement, just like its historic 1996 law did for medical marijuana.

Legislators in Rhode Island are considering a plan to decriminalize pot, and a group in Nevada is pushing an initiative that marks the state's fourth attempt in a decade to legalize the drug.

Lawmakers in Washington state recently killed a plan to legalize the sale and use of marijuana, though lawmakers there did expand the pool of medical professionals who could prescribe the drug for medicinal use.

The ballot measure in California would allow people 21 years and older to possess up to one ounce of marijuana, enough for dozens of joints. Residents also could grow their own crop of the plant in gardens measuring up to 25 square feet.

The proposal would ban users from using marijuana in public or smoking it while minors are present. It also would make it illegal to possess the drug on school grounds or drive while under its influence.

Proponents of the measure say legalizing marijuana could save the state $200 million a year by reducing public safety costs. At the same time, it could generate tax revenue for local governments.

Law enforcement officials are promising a vigorous fight to ensure that marijuana never becomes legal in California. They believe legalized marijuana would increase crime and violence, deepen the nation's drug culture and lead teenagers to abuse pot.

The California Police Chiefs Association, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and groups such as the youth-oriented Drug Abuse Resistance Education also plan to oppose the idea.

Not everyone in law enforcement is opposed to the measure, however.

"We believe by voting for that initiative you can actually save lives," Cole said.

congress, israel, and u.s. national security

CounterPunch | The Israeli “economic miracle” and technological innovations have spawned articles and a best-selling book in recent months. The country’s average GDP growth rate has exceeded the average rate of most western countries over the past five years. Israel provides universal health insurance, unlike the situation in the U.S., which raises the question of who should be aiding whom?

Keep in mind, the U.S. economy is mired in a recession, with large rates of growing poverty, unemployment, consumer debt and state and federal deficits. In some states, public schools are shutting, public health services are being slashed, and universities are increasing tuition while also cutting programs. Even state government buildings are being sold off.

Under U.S. law, military sales to Israel cannot be used for offensive purposes, only for “legitimate self-defense.” Nonetheless, there have been numerous violations of the Arms Export Control Act by Israel. Even the indifferent State Department has found, from time to time, that munitions such as cluster bombs were “likely violations.”

Violations would lead to a cut-off in aid but with the completely pro-Israel climate in Washington, the White House has never allowed such findings to be definitive.

The same indifference applies to violations of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act that prohibits aid to countries engaging in consistent international human rights violations. These include the occupation, colonization, blockades and military assaults on civilians in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, regularly documented by the highly regarded Israeli human rights group B’Tselem as well as by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

This week, Prime Minister Netanyahu visits President Barack Obama after the recent Israeli announcement of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem made while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting that country.

The affront infuriated New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, who wrote that Mr. Biden should have packed his bags and flown away leaving behind a scribbled note saying “You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality.”

Friedman, a former Times Middle East correspondent, concluded his rebuke by writing: “Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad are as genuine and serious about working toward a solution as any Israel can hope to find.”

But until a few days ago, the U.S. government had no levers over the Israeli government. Cutting off aid isn’t even whispered in the halls of Congress. Raising the issue would further galvanize Israel’s allies, including AIPAC.

The only lever left for the U.S. suddenly erupted into the public media a few days ago. General David Petraeus told the Senate that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has foreign policy and national security ramifications for the United States.

He said that “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the Area of Responsibility…Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and other military groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”

A few days earlier, Vice President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel that “what you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

What Obama’s people are publically starting to say is that regional peace is about U.S. vital interests in that large part of the Middle East and, ultimately, the safety of American soldiers and personnel.

As one retired diplomat commented “This could be a game-changer.”

israel, obama, and the doomsday weapon

CounterPunch | WHAT BEGAN as an insult to the Vice President of the United States is developing into something far bigger. The mouse has given birth to an elephant.

Lately, the ultra-right government in Jerusalem has started to treat President Barack Obama with thinly veiled contempt. The fears that arose in Jerusalem at the beginning of his term have dissipated. Obama looks to them like a paper black panther. He gave up his demand for a real settlement freeze. Every time he was spat on, he remarked that it was raining.

Yet now, ostensibly quite suddenly, the measure is full. Obama, his Vice President and his senior assistants condemn the Netanyahu government with growing severity. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has submitted an ultimatum: Netanyahu must stop all settlement activity, East Jerusalem included; he must agree to negotiate about all core problems of the conflict, including East Jerusalem, and more.

The surprise was complete. Obama, it seems, has crossed the Rubicon, much as the Egyptian army had crossed the Suez Canal in 1973. Netanyahu gave the order to mobilize all the reserves in America and to move forward all the diplomatic tanks. All Jewish organizations in the US were commanded to join the campaign. AIPAC blew the shofar and ordered its soldiers, the Senators and Congressmen, to storm the White House.

It seems that the decisive battle has been joined. The Israeli leaders were certain that Obama would be defeated.

And then an unusual noise was heard: the sound of the doomsday weapon.

* * *

THE MAN who decided to activate it was a foe of a new kind.

David Petraeus is the most popular officer of the United States army. The four-star general, son of a Dutch sea captain who went to America when his country was overrun by the Nazis, stood out from early childhood. In West Point he was a “distinguished cadet”, in Army Command and General Staff College he was No. 1. As a combat commander, he reaped plaudits. He wrote his doctoral thesis (on the lessons of Vietnam) at Princeton and served as an assistant professor for international relations in the US Military Academy.

He made his mark in Iraq, when he commanded the forces in Mosul, the most problematical city in the country. He concluded that in order to vanquish the enemies of the US he must win over the hearts of the civilian population, acquire local allies and spend more money than ammunition. The locals called him King David. His success was considered so outstanding that his methods were adopted as the official doctrine of the American army.

His star rose rapidly. He was appointed commander of the coalition forces in Iraq and soon became the chief of the Central Command of the US army, which covers the whole Middle East , except Israel and Palestine (which “belong” to the American command in Europe).

When such a person raises his voice, the American people listen. As a respected military thinker, he has no rivals.

* * *

THIS WEEK, Petraeus conveyed an unequivocal message: after reviewing the problems in his AOR (Area Of Responsibility) – which includes, among others, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Yemen – he turned to what he called the “root causes of instability” in the region. The list was topped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In his report to the Armed Services Committee he stated: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR…The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.”

Not content with that, Petraeus sent his officers to present his conclusions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

In other words: Israeli-Palestinian peace is not a private matter between the two parties, but a supreme national interest of the USA. That means that the US must give up its one-sided support for the Israeli government and impose the two-state solution.

why israel always prevails

CounterPunch | The gravity of the situation was not lost upon Israel’s new ambassador, American-born historian, Michael Oren, who, in a conference call with Israel’s US consulates, reportedly expressed the opinion (which he now denies) that this was the worst crisis in US-Israel relations since 1975 when Pres. Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly blamed Israel for the breakdown of negotiations with Egypt over withdrawing from the Sinai. As a consequence, Ford announced that he was going to make a major speech calling for a reassessment of Israel-US relations. Although hardly the powerhouse that it has become today, AIPAC, the only officially registered pro-Israel lobby, responded to the threat by getting 76 senators to sign a harsh letter to Ford, warning him not to tamper with Israel-US relations. Ford never made the speech and it would not be the last time that AIPAC got three quarters of the US Senate to sign a letter designed to keep an American president in check.

Others point to the nationally televised speech on September 12, 1991 of the first President Bush, who, upon realizing that AIPAC had secured enough votes in both houses of Congress to override his veto of Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, went before the American public depicting himself as “one lonely little guy” battling a thousand lobbyists on Capitol Hill. A national poll taken immediately afterward gave the president an 85 per cent approval rating which sent the lobby and its Congressional flunkies scuttling into the corner but not before AIPAC director, Tom Dine, exclaimed at that date, Sept. 12, 1991, “would live in infamy.” Following the election of Yitzhak Rabin the following year and up for re-election himself, Bush relented and approved the loan guarantee request.

There are those who, while aware of what happened to Ford and of the subsequent humiliations visited by Israel upon American presidents and secretaries of state, view the Biden affair as a charade designed to placate the heads of Arab governments as well as their respective peoples and give the impression that there is a space between Israel and the US when it comes to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict when, they assert, none exists.

Viewing the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements and settlers in the West Bank through one US administration after another for the past four decades they would appear to have a solid argument. It is undermined, however, by one obvious fact: while the rest of the world considers the Israel-Palestine conflict to be a foreign policy concern, for Washington and both Democrats and Republicans it has been and remains primarily a domestic issue. In that arena there is only one player, the pro-Israel “lobby” which is represented by a multitude of organizations, the most prominent of which is AIPAC.

As if it needed more help, flocking to Israel’s side in increasing numbers over the past several decades have come the majority of America’s Christian evangelicals whose doomsday theology fits in nicely with that of Israel’s ultra right wing settler movement. The result is that in each election cycle anyone with any hope of being elected to a national political office, be it in the White House or Congress, whether incumbent or challenger, feels obligated to express his or her unconditional loyalty to Israel by shamelessly groveling for handouts from Jewish donors and the nod from Jewish voters who make up critical voting blocs in at least six states.

This being the case, it is not so strange that a string of leading elected American officials would willingly submit to public humiliation by a country so politically and militarily dependent on the U.S. and whose population is less than that of New York City or Los Angeles County, even when doing so has made the U.S. seem weak in the eyes of a world in which Washington has other, more pressing interests, than pleasing Israel. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Barack Obama whose stature as leader of “the world’s only superpower” has been severely undercut by repeated verbal face-slappings at the hands of Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers.

It clearly has been in the US interest that the Israel-Palestine conflict be peacefully resolved. There is nothing in the proposed “two-state solution” that would interfere with Washington’s regional objectives. On the contrary, the creation of a truncated Palestinian statelet, allied and dependent, politically and financially on the US, as it most certainly would be, would be a boon to US regional interests and ultimately viewed as a setback for anti-imperialist struggles worldwide. It was not just to expend some US taxpayers’ money that the GW Bush administration built a four story security building for the PA in Ramallah (that Sharon later destroyed), brought PA security personnel to Langley, VA for training with the CIA, and had Gen. Dayton build a colonial army to maintain order.

Israeli officials view all of this from a very different perspective, as should be obvious, and will do everything they can to prevent any kind of a Palestinian entity from coming into existence since this would interfere not only with its expansion plans but would also create a junior competitor for US favors in the region. This was why Sharon targeted the US built institutions on the West Bank and the CIA trained personnel during the Al-Aksa Intifada despite the fact that they were non-participants, which raised the hackles at CIA headquarters, as reported at the time in the Washington Post.

What the insult to Biden was clearly designed to do, as were the previous humiliations, was to remind the current and future occupants of the White House that when it comes to making decisions concerning the Middle East, it is Israel that calls the tune. As Stephen Green spelled it out in "Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel" (Morrow, 1984) a quarter century ago, "Since 1953, Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with tactical issues."

a brief history of the superorganism

Wired | Evolutionary biologist and superorganism pioneer Bert Hoelldobler talked to me about the history of superorganism theory. Part 1 of the interview is here, and here’s the rest:

Leafcutter ants make unbelievable nest structures. They have castles underground that go eight meters deep, that have a surface of about 50 square meters, and all sort of channels, chambers. It’s a beautifully constructed piece of art, and not one ant would be able to do this; this is an emergent structure of interactions that follow certain rules of thumb that we don’t understand yet. Almost as complicated as the brain. Put a couple million individuals — tiny little brains — together, and they interact according to certain rules that create an emergent pattern. The end result is these fantastic nests. And not only that, these collectives of little brains — if you take a picture of the brain, a brain consists of a couple million or billion neurons. The members of an ant colony [are neurons that form] a little brain. These are millions of brains connected in a way we don’t understand yet.

It’s as exciting as understanding the pattern of a brain. We try to understand the connections of these millions of ants that creates this caste system, complex communicaiton and foraging and territorial strategies, and it’s all done by these interactions. When you look at these things, you can’t avoid saying, at this stage an insect colony functions like an organism. A superorganism. And you can go forward and say, this is an extended phenotype: selection doesn’t work on individual level, but on the whole colony.

If you have in a population many colonies of same species, they compete with each other like solitary animals competing with one another. The colony which has a slightly better communication system to bring in limited resources, and if this slight difference has a genetic basis, that colony will reproduce faster than the neighboring colony, and the gene — the allele that codes for a slightly better communication system — will spread faster than the alleles of the neighboring colony. The phenotype is the colony, shaped by this selection. Of course, it is in the end the gene carried by the queen, the male, that spreads, and the workers are the extended phenotype which, because of their particular adapatation, will affect the spread of these genes.

When we look at how selection shapes things, we had to realize that it didn’t help us to take a purely gene perspective, like Richard Dawkins. Not that he’s wrong, but it doesn’t say as much about how selection works. Multi-level selection isn’t new, it was already proposed in the seventies, but we’ve worked it out more. The colony in the leafcutter or army ants is a major target of selection.

Not all ant societies are like this. They’re not full superorganisms. Ed Wilson sees this for all ants; I don’t. There are phylogenetically primitive ants, not so evolved as leafcutters, and they have internal friction — fights for reproduction privileges. They have superorganism traits, but I wouldn’t call them true superorganisms, as there’s a lot of selection going on at the individual level in the community. They haven’t reached point where in-colony conflict is gone and it’s now between-colony.

People ask, why aren’t all ants now superorganisms? Why do they all still show these ancestral traits? Very simple: they haven’t changed much. They fit into a particular niche.

So do we learn from this about humans? I’m very careful, because human society is a society built on a cultural fundamental basis. But there are biological rules to our social behavior: no question. We are one of the few species to evolve social systems. What is common in all these social systems is a division of labor; and once this was evolutionarily rendered, it became incredibly successful. This is true for almost any society: once they reach a high division of labor, they have enormous successes due to division of labor. And the second thing, once a society becomes almost like an organism, it becomes very tightly interconnected.

In our early past, in our still-biological past, 15,000 years ago we were hunter gatherers. We showed group cohesiveness and discrimination against other groups. It was adaptive. It was quite understandable that we evolved traits of group recognition, and making sure we recognized foreigners. This is my conviction that this is probably the early basis for our unfortunate xenophobic behavior that is still in us. It’s a behavior that is now terribly maladaptive. I keep always citing David Hume — that just because there is an atavistic trait in us, it doesn’t justify that we live it.

could ants hold the key to sustainable agriculture?

Wired | Crop monocultures are bad. How, then, has the world’s most successful herbivore thrived by exploiting a single cloned crop?

That conundrum is posed by the leafcutter ant, which harvests more greenery than any other South American animal and uses the vast plantfall to feed the fungi gardens on which they subsist.

But while other ant farmers plant a variety of fungus species, leafcutters sow just one, and they propagate it through cloning. That seems to contradict a tenet of sustainable farming: monocultures are bad, as their lack of genetic diversity leaves them vulnerable to disease and disruption.

How have leafcutters managed this trick? And could they teach us how to make our own agriculture sustainable?

At present, the land provides us with enough to eat — but that might not last. Many agronomists say the clock is ticking on the bounties of the Green Revolution, which depended on fossil fuel-fueled pesticides and fertilizers, as well as soil-wearying techniques and the establishment of vast monocultures.

With the Earth’s population booming and nearly every farm-friendly acre already exploited, keeping our farms running is a looming concern. And for inspiration, says Smithsonian Institution entomologist Ted Schultz, we might look to the leafcutter ant, which despite its reliance on a single crop represents the apex of ant agriculture.

I talked this morning with Schultz, who co-authored a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on the evolutionary history of ant farming. Schultz described a complex evolutionary dance: the leafcutter fungi is constantly threatened by disease. At the same time, bacteria living on ant exoskeletons produces a disease-killing antibiotic. But somehow the system has stabilized, preventing pathogens from ever raging out of control.

farmer ants fertilize their gardens with bacteria

Wired | “It’s entirely possible that nitrogen-fixing bacteria played a critical role in the evolution of this very different group of ants, with their giant colonies and massive effects on the environment,” said Ted Schultz, a Smithsonian Institute entomologist who was not involved in the study. He and Currie both noted that leafcutters are uniquely complex among fungus-growing ants, but evolved just 10 million years ago, or 40 million years after other fungus growers.

“What humans do for nitrogen is mine it from other sources, and dump it on our crops,” said Schultz. But this leads to waste and pollution, “and the ants accomplish it through microbes. Who knows? Maybe humans could do something similar, and cultivate microbial communities in the soil around our crops.”

And this isn’t the only trick farmers might learn from the ants. In March 2008, Schultz showed that leafcutters also use antibiotic-producing microbes to keep their gardens pest-free.

Currie is studying whether nitrogen-fixing bacteria help break down the ants’ leaf cuttings into a fungally-digestible form. If so, the bacteria may suggest better ways of turning plants into biofuels. “We need to discover new enzymes, new processes, to convert plant cell walls into simple sugars that can be converted into ethanol,” he said. “Ants have been converting plant biomass into energy for millions of years.”

Currie added that leafcutter ants are the subject of thousands of papers authored over the last century, “yet this critical aspect of their success was completely unknown.”

“This is a well-studied natural system, and we’re still learning who the players are,” he said. “What does that say about most of the natural world, where mutalisms and associations haven’t been studied?”

antarctica shelters abundant microbial life

WaPo | Antarctica makes up more than 10 percent of the world's land mass, but it was long assumed that -- except for some hardy penguins -- it had virtually no life. With ice and snow blanketing virtually the entire continent, the environment was believed to be just too harsh and barren to support anything beyond occasional human visitors.

Antarctica remains as foreboding as ever, but scientists have in recent years learned they were spectacularly wrong about its inhabitants. While the life might not be visible, it is most definitely there: in the snow, in the ice, in the lakes and streams under the ice, and in the waters under the ice sheet.

It is the kingdom of microbes, of tiny bacteria and other microscopic organisms that in some Antarctic regions eke out a bare existence, and in others are almost flourishing. They are extremely small, but one Antarctic researcher has calculated that the mass of living cells in Antarctica equals or exceeds all the living creatures in the freshwater lakes, rivers and streams elsewhere on Earth.

"There was this idea until not very long ago that Antarctica was a place frozen in time, without life," said Chuck Kennicutt, an oceanographer and co-chair of a conference held last week in Baltimore on subglacial Antarctic research.

"Every field season we learn how dynamic and alive it actually is," he said, referring to period between October and February, when the continent is its warmest and research activity is greatest. "When it comes to understanding our planet, Antarctica is about the last frontier."

The conference, which drew 100 scientists from around the world, was called at an especially auspicious time for those interested in life and subglacial systems on "The Ice," as the continent is often called.

That's because three major projects are underway that, over the next five years, will greatly expand and refine our knowledge about hidden worlds that only recently were discovered.

epigenetics drives phenotype?

The Scientist | Researchers have identified a possible mechanism by which DNA regions that don't encode proteins can still determine phenotypic traits such as a person's height or susceptibility to a particular disease, researchers report online in Science today.

The scientists found that certain chromatin modifications often considered to be epigenetic -- meaning, regulated by factors other than genetic sequence -- are in fact determined by a person's DNA.

Moreover, they found that this chromatin variation is associated with distinct single nucleotide polymorphisms, suggesting that the variation may serve as a platform to enable these SNPs -- often found in non-coding regions of DNA -- to influence phenotype.

"This is quite novel," said Emmanouil Dermitzakis, a geneticist at the University of Geneva Medical School, who was not involved in the study. "Epigenetics has been used as a term that is orthogonal to genetics. This study clearly shows it's not."

the party of cruelty

Kunstler | At least this once a workable majority in the government has stood up to the forces of cruelty and injustice, and whatever else happens to us in the course of this long emergency, it will be a good thing if the party of fairness and justice identifies its adversaries for what they are: not "partners in governing," or any such academical-therapeutic bullshit, but enemies of every generous impulse in the national character.

I hope that Mr. Obama's party can carry this message clearly into the electoral battles ahead, painting the Republican opposition for what it is: a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good. In fact, the current edition of the Republican party has achieved something really memorable in the annals of collective bad intentions: they have managed to create a sense of the public interest whose main goal is the destruction of the public interest.

This is exactly what the Republican majority on the Supreme Court did earlier this year by deciding that corporations -- which are sociopathic by definition in being answerable only to their shareholders and nothing else -- should enjoy the same full privileges in election campaign contributions as human persons, who are assumed to have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the common good (and therefore to the public interest). This shameful act by the court majority only underscores the chief defining characteristic of Republicans in their current incarnation: an inability to think. And so, naturally Republicans gravitate toward superstition and the traditional devices of improvident religious authorities -- persecution of the weak, torture, denial of due process, and dogmas designed to spread hatred. Fist tap Dale.

psychopathic neurosis

Neurological Correlates | What makes Nazis or the BTK killer or the psychopath-guy-the-army-put-in-charge-of-anthrax-research unspeakably cruel to selected targets but otherwise social norm compliance with the rest of their lives?

Short answer: Authoritarian + neurosis = psychopathic neurosis, a new category of evil.

Full text available: Cotter P (2010) The path to extreme violence: Nazism and serial killers. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 3:61. doi: 10.3389/neuro.08.061.2009

Finally, someone is attempting to deconstruct those who are selective about their proactive aggression. As with domestic violence, this involves selective aggression — not global or generalized (although apparently it can spiral down this way). And this is the puzzle — what makes people only selectively hateful?

About the closest reading that attempts to develop a systematic, organized response including biology is, “Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend” .

The Cotter paper out of Geneva combines

(a) psychohistory (how come Nazis are that way, and what’s the difference between a Nazi and a serial killer? Answer: Nazis are cognitively more able to construct a world view, “Weltanschauung,”),

(b) the Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1969 but there are a number of version, one’s up in the Amazon box — this was a study of people to see what authoritarians (e.g., similar to Nazis) think about, versus what more “liberal” (e.g., more egalitarian) people — if you read it your worst suspicions are confirmed);

(c) psychopathy classic research from Cleckley, and

(d) FBI profiling research.

Here is the tee-up for a new category of evil — psychopathic neurosis. Fist tap Dale.

what change looks like...,

President Obama on healthcare legislation.

democrats could pay a political price

WaPo | Regardless of the political fallout, historians say health-care reform will take its place in the same category as the enactment of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, and only a rung or two below passage of the major civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the bill's providing coverage for more than 32 million uninsured Americans, people would no longer be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. The "doughnut hole" for Medicare prescriptions would eventually be eliminated, and young people could stay on their parents' insurance plan through age 26.

"I think this will be seen as a really major reform initiative," said presidential historian Robert Dallek. "How it plays out remains to be seen. But if Social Security and Medicare and civil rights are any preludes to this initiative, then I think it will become a fixed part of the national political/social/economic culture."

former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

No one doubts that Johnson was right to push for those civil rights measures. And he was well aware of the potential damage they would do to a Democratic Party that was then a coalition including whites and African Americans, liberals from the North and conservative segregationists from the South.

Those battles over civil rights set off a political realignment that played out over decades and led eventually to a Republican domination of the South that continues to this day.

Still, the health-care battle has divided the country in ways that the Medicare debate of the 1960s did not. One reason is that partisanship and political polarization are measurably worse today. Another factor is that trust in government is far lower than in the 1960s. Finally, the political parties are far more homogenous, particularly the Republican Party, whose members decidedly identify themselves as conservative or very conservative.

a detention bill warranting additional scrutiny

The Atlantic | Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump.

According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

(There is no distinction between U.S. persons--visa holders or citizens--and non-U.S. persons.)

It would require these "belligerents" to be coded as "high-value detainee[s]" to be held in military custody and interrogated for their intelligence value by a High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team established by the president. (The H.I.G., of course, was established to bring a sophisticated interrogation capacity to the federal justice system.)

reading and the web....,

NYTimes | Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”

Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

political culture 2.0?

NYTimes | The virtual image is as mesmerizing as it is creepy. Meg Whitman, the leading Republican candidate for governor of California and the former chief executive of eBay, stands in front of a private jet, her lips peeled back from thick gums, and virtually snorts into the camera, “California, let me take you for a ride.”

Anyone who knows Ms. Whitman’s face — or the tangy lilt in her voice — would easily recognize her in this political attack advertisement. But the ad does not actually feature Ms. Whitman at all, but rather a technically impressive avatar of the candidate, talking trash about herself.

A new chapter of campaign attacks is unfolding in California this election season, in which highly sophisticated, fairly low-cost technology is being used to create nasty — and just plain weird — ads and videos that are intended to shock and draw large audiences on Internet sites like YouTube and Facebook.

It began last month, when Carly Fiorina, a Republican running for the Senate, released a Web video portraying her main opponent in the June primary, Tom Campbell, as a demon sheep. It was an instant Web hit. The Fiorina campaign followed up with another video, more than seven minutes long, depicting Senator Barbara Boxer, the Democratic incumbent, as a crazed blimp, floating across the country.

“If you can make something go viral,” said Evan Tracey, president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group and an expert on political advertising, “and make these ads unique, then they get this whole second life.”

trust underwater

NYTimes | As Grace, a nonnative speaker, recalled it, the man at the bank appeared to be saying, ‘‘Congratulations, you've won a house!'' And since all the people around her seemed to be scoring their own piece of real estate, nothing about this struck her as preposterous. Only now the loan was eating up something like 75 percent of her income, and the rate on her second trust was about to double, and she didn't how she could continue to keep up with the payments. She hadn't understood that her house could plummet in value while the interest rate on her loan soared toward oblivion. No one ever explained that part.

And now to the other emotions this mortgage process had provoked in me — self-doubt, persecution, self-righteousness — I had to add some amount of shame, as well. I had been blaming other, less conscientious borrowers for our predicament, but of course Grace hadn't been greedy. She had been duped by a guy in a suit, even if she should have asked more questions than she did. And now when I called brokers to check the rates or float some new financing idea, I found myself seething. It wasn't that they wouldn't lend me all the money I wanted - it was the utter sobriety they seemed bent on projecting, the way I could almost hear their shirt collars rustle as they knowingly shook their heads at me across the telephone line. After all, I reasoned, they were the ones who had gone and exploded a yawing hole in the American economy, not me or Grace, by pushing on unqualified buyers the kinds of gimmicks the brokers barely understood themselves. And yet, the bankers seemed to regard themselves now as passive casualties in our national train wreck.

They taught us, back in my freshman-year economics class, that financial catastrophes were crises of faith, and this is a theory held by the most influential economic advisers in Washington. The national engine sputters and fails, the thinking goes, when consumers no longer trust in the value of the currency or the banks that stockpile it. What they never explained, though, and maybe what a lot of us are learning now, is the way such once-in-a-century implosions erode our faith in one another, too, and in the institutions we grew up with and even in ourselves. The collapse of the housing market and the contraction of credit go right to the core of our national identity, forcing us to readjust our expectations for what we can attain and what we deserve. And when we come to understand that we may never really be able to afford even a modest row house or that those of us who live more comfortably will never be comfortable enough to buy into the perfect school district or to add that cottage by the beach, then we cast our anxious glances around for someone to blame. Culprits aren't hard to find. We are, most of us, responsible, if only because we wanted so badly to believe.

Not long ago, my wife and I finally settled on a new house in a close-in suburb, along with exactly the loan I probably should have had all along: a no-frills, 30-year fixed-rate relic, the same dependable model our parents always had. The house itself is a spacious, if deteriorated split-level with an extra room for Grace, should it turn out that she needs somewhere to stay for a while. We like having her around, and it might serve as good reminder that there are worse fates for an American homeowner than having to live with orange Formica countertops or not being able to add the turret of your dreams.

a little predictive climate setting?

NYTimes | At a certain point last summer, when snipers on rooftops began picking off police officers, Col. Mukhtar Mukhtarov’s wife blocked the door with her body and refused to let him leave home in his uniform.

For 25 years, it had been one of the great joys of Colonel Mukhtarov’s life to walk the streets in his red-striped police cap. But by last summer all that had been turned so thoroughly on its head that he quietly went back to his bedroom to change into civilian clothes.

His son Gassan, a 20-year-old beat officer, has known the job only this way, thick with fear. He changes in his car outside the station house. Aware that militants often follow police officers for days before killing them — his neck sometimes prickling with the sense of being watched — Gassan Mukhtarov swaps license plates with friends to make himself harder to track. He is still not safe. He knows that.

“They’ve known who I was from the first day,” he said.

It is all a measure of how thoroughly order has broken down in the Russian region of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus. Fifty-eight police officers were killed in attacks here last year, according to the republic’s Interior Ministry, many of them while running errands or standing at their posts. Last month alone, according to press reports, 13 officers were killed in bombings and gangland-style shootings.

The gunmen — some combination of Islamist militants, alienated young people, ordinary criminals and foot soldiers in private armies — just melt back into the city, to be described in the next day’s news reports as “persons unknown.”

As the number of attacks doubled, to 201 last year from 100 in 2008, the authorities tried to offer relief. The blue stripes were removed from most police cars and officers were told they no longer had to wear uniforms on the way to work. In a weird touch, every traffic officer in Makhachkala (pronounced ma-HACH-ka-la), the capital city, is now backed up by a riot policeman in camouflage, Kalashnikov assault rifle at the ready.

Even so, recruits are under pressure from friends and relatives to quit, said Gassan Mukhtarov, who is a lieutenant. He said he could not really blame them.

“If you had a son, would you let him work as a policeman?” he asked. “I wouldn’t let my own son do it.”

The police occupy a miserable place in Russian society, where many citizens see officers as so corrupt and brutal they prefer to settle their disputes alone. But no environment is more hostile than the North Caucasus, where occasional clashes with militants have intensified into something closer to guerrilla warfare.

cooke county cop collapse

FoxNews | A sheriff's department in suburban Chicago has been shocked to find a roomful of evidence left behind by a village police department that shut down two years ago -- including a moldy sexual assault kit that authorities said linked a man to the 2006 rape of a 13-year-old girl, nearly 200 guns and hundreds of bags of narcotics, officials said Friday.

In all, seven rape kits had been left rotting in an unplugged refrigerator in the former Ford Heights Police Department, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said. The guns had not been registered with the state as having been seized by police, and Dart's spokesman Steve Patterson said none of the DNA evidence found matches anyone in the state's database.

"You're not talking about ineptness, neglect, you're talking about outrageous conduct of a police department that didn't care about the residents out there," Dart said.

His deputies have been patrolling Ford Heights for the past few years after financial problems forced the village to lay off most of its 16 police officers. The sheriff's department took over completely in 2008, after two years of sharing duties with what was left of the police department, because the last few Ford Heights officers simply stopped showing up for work, Dart said.

"They just vanished," he said. Cook County deputies didn't use the police department's headquarters, because the former chief, Earl Bridges, continued working in some capacity regarding code enforcement. But Dart said he became uncomfortable with Bridges remaining in the building after it became clear the sheriff's department would be handling law enforcement in Ford Heights for the foreseeable future. Fist tap Dale.

race and mythology in drug laws

NYTimes | Congress is trying to undo some of the damage it inflicted more than two decades ago with its frenzied mandating of longer prison sentences for abusers of crack cocaine than for those who abuse the powder version.

The result has been disproportionately harsher punishment for crack offenders in black neigborhoods.

The law is built on a scientifically indefensible 100-to-1 ratio, which means the same prison term (a minimum of five years) for 5 ounces of crack as for 500 ounces of the powder kind.

A compromise reform of the law approved this week by the Senate would repeal mandated sentences for simple possession and reduce the ratio to 18-to-1 for trafficking in crack versus powder cocaine.

This standard is still irrational, if significantly less so than current law. It’s imperative for the House to fight for the 1-to-1 ratio when it takes up the issue. Otherwise, the law will remain tinged with racism even if relative harshness is cut back.

The sentencing disparity was enacted amid a wave of crack use and hyperbolic warnings that crack — cocaine cooked in baking soda — was more addictive than powder cocaine.

That has since been disproved by scientific studies. That hasn’t stopped tens of thousands from being sentenced unfairly under the skewed law. Recent studies showed that while blacks make up 30 percent of crack users, they compose more than 80 percent of those convicted under the federal law.

After pressing for the 1-to-1 ratio, Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois, says he accepted the 18-to-1 compromise with Republican opponents because it is the best available chance to “ensure that every year thousands of people are treated more fairly in our criminal justice system.”

The senator can be commended for his efforts. Now it’s up to the House to totally end the disparity and the severe injustice it has wrought.

can broke states maintain their unbeaten record?

Salon | Police in this picturesque city in rural Riverside County have been on edge in recent weeks. Someone is trying to kill them.

First, a natural gas pipe was shoved through a hole drilled into the roof of the gang enforcement unit's headquarters. The building filled with flammable vapor but an officer smelled the danger before anyone was hurt.

"It would have taken out half a city block," Capt. Tony Marghis said. Then, a ballistic contraption was attached to a sliding security fence around the building. An officer opening the black steel gate triggered the mechanism, which sent a bullet within eight inches of his face.

In another attempted booby trap attack, some kind of explosive device was attached to a police officer's unmarked car while he went into a convenience store.

"There's a person or people out there, a bunch of idiots, trying to do damage to us," Hemet Police Chief Richard Dana said. "We can't expect our luck to hold up, we need help."

Since New Year's Eve, there have been several other booby trap attempts to kill officers, Dana said.

"The only reason they haven't killed an officer yet is because we've been observant enough to see devices planted around the station and in cars and different places," he said.

Gang enforcement officers appear to be the target of the assassination attempts, though Dana noted the devices were indiscriminate by nature and could have killed any police or law enforcement officer.

The incidents have shaken a close-knit police department already demoralized by steep budget cuts that last year saw its officer numbers slashed by a quarter to 68. Officers are checking under cars for bombs and scouting for other potential hazards.

"I would call the mood tense," Capt. Marghis said. "Everyone is being very vigilant about their surroundings and the environment."

Dana said officers have seen gang members carrying out counter-surveillance, studying police behavior. He often looks in his rear view mirror when he drives home at night to make sure he is not being followed. Fist tap Dale.

number of people living on n.y.c. streets soars

NYTimes | The Bloomberg administration said Friday that the number of people living on New York’s streets and subways soared 34 percent in a year, signaling a setback in one of the city’s most intractable problems.

Appearing both startled and dismayed by the sharp increase, a year after a significant drop, administration officials attributed it to the recession, noting that city shelters for families and single adults had been inundated.

Robert V. Hess, the commissioner of homeless services, said in a subdued news conference that the city began feeling the increase in its vast shelter system more than two years ago. “And now we’re seeing the devastating effect of this unprecedented poor economy on our streets as well,” Mr. Hess said.

one classroom from sea to shining sea

NYTimes | AMERICAN public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation’s schools.

Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas City, Mo., officials voted to close nearly half the public schools there to save money. And the Texas Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum playing down the separation of church and state and even eliminating Thomas Jefferson — the author of that malignant phrase, “wall of separation” — from a list of revolutionary writers.

Each of these seemingly unrelated developments is part of a crazy quilt created by one of America’s most cherished and unexamined traditions: local and state control of public education. Schooling had been naturally decentralized in the Colonial era — with Puritan New England having a huge head start on the other colonies by the late 1600s — and, in deference to the de facto system of community control already in place, the Constitution made no mention of education. No one in either party today has the courage to say it, but what made sense for a sparsely settled continent at the dawn of the Republic is ill suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy.

Our lack of a national curriculum, national teacher training standards and federal financial support to attract smart young people to the teaching profession all contribute mightily to the mediocre-to-poor performance of American students, year in and year out, on international education assessments. So does a financing system that relies heavily on local property taxes and fails to guarantee students in, say, Kansas City the same level of schooling as students in more affluent communities.

states rights is rallying cry for lawmakers

NYTimes | Whether it’s correctly called a movement, a backlash or political theater, state declarations of their rights — or in some cases denunciations of federal authority, amounting to the same thing — are on a roll.

Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Some legal scholars say the new states’ rights drive has more smoke than fire, but for lawmakers, just taking a stand can be important enough.

“Who is the sovereign, the state or the federal government?” said State Representative Chris N. Herrod, a Republican from Provo, Utah, and leader of the 30-member Patrick Henry Caucus, which formed last year and led the assault on federal legal barricades in the session that ended Thursday. Fist tap Nana.

the broken society

NYTimes | The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

He grew up in working-class Liverpool. “I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated,” he told The New Statesman. “It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed.” Industry died. Political power was centralized in London.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

uh oh - pitchfork event on the horizon

ComradeSimba | This one really bothers me. I mean reeeeally bothers me. I have stated in the past that he who swabs me (or is holding the gun for the swabber) dies. Sort of my pitchfork take to the streets line in the sand.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/obama-supports-dna-sampling-upon-arrest

Now I’m not knee-jerk for or against the present administration – I fully understand that our gov’t has gotten powerful enough to wield whatever power it feels like implementing so – fair warning – I will delete any comment that points a finger at Obama or any specific individual. This isn’t politics, it’s Endgame and I’m not waving flags or burning flags, I’m simply saying my rubicon has been crossed if “law enforcement” can use any excuse to arrest, and therefore gain a personal DNA sample from me.

What it means is that I enter into a purely defensive posture. I’m not the fool that is going to try to make a difference, or make a statement by doing some headline grabbing antic. To become invisible, unremarkable and unknown sounds like the best course of action available. I don’t get drunk and rowdy in bars so the only foreseeable reason for an arrest would be a less than boot licking attitude towards the cop who stops me for long hair dead taillight, leading to the all purpose “obstruction” charge and out comes the Q-tip. And it’s all about avoiding the Q-tip, so “yassa officer” would be the order of the day if the red lights come on behind me. I can seeth all I want to inside at all the injustice of the world and feel like apiece of shit suck-ass – pansy extraordinaire , but I get to go home where my family is rather than Sing-Sing for being a cop killer.

Wanna know the truth? I’ll move my line further back. Swabbie gets to live if I get Q-tipped. But inside my last shred of concern or care for what little social involvement I still have will just have to r.i.p. The blogs goes, I’ll drop the community group thing, cancel the remaining credit card, cease commercial activity, and lock down into growing food all over the woods, talking to the animals and generally become one with the forest. If our human society isn’t fit to live in well, I’ll just be done with the whole enterprise. Fist tap Dale.

obama supports dna sampling upon arrest

Wired | Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting.

Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted. The nation’s chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, even absent charges or a conviction. Obama said, “It’s the right thing to do” to “tighten the grip around folks” who commit crime.

When it comes to civil liberties, the Obama administration has come under fire for often mirroring his predecessor’s practices surrounding state secrets, the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There’s also Gitmo, Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

Now there’s DNA sampling. Obama told Walsh he supported the federal government, as well as the 18 states that have varying laws requiring compulsory DNA sampling of individuals upon an arrest for crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies. The data is lodged in state and federal databases, and has fostered as many as 200 arrests nationwide, Walsh said.

The American Civil Liberties Union claims DNA sampling is different from mandatory, upon-arrest fingerprinting that has been standard practice in the United States for decades.

A fingerprint, the group says, reveals nothing more than a person’s identity. But much can be learned from a DNA sample, which codes a person’s family ties, some health risks, and, according to some, can predict a propensity for violence.

The ACLU is suing California to block its voter-approved measure requiring saliva sampling of people picked up on felony charges. Authorities in the Golden State are allowed to conduct so-called “familial searching” — when a genetic sample does not directly match another, authorities start investigating people with closely matched DNA in hopes of finding leads to the perpetrator.

Do you wonder whether DNA sampling is legal?

frogs, foam, fuel...,

UniversityofCincinnati | Engineers from the University of Cincinnati devise a foam that captures energy and removes excess carbon dioxide from the air — thanks to semi-tropical frogs.

For decades, farmers have been trying to find ways to get more energy out of the sun.

In natural photosynthesis, plants take in solar energy and carbon dioxide and then convert it to oxygen and sugars. The oxygen is released to the air and the sugars are dispersed throughout the plant — like that sweet corn we look for in the summer. Unfortunately, the allocation of light energy into products we use is not as efficient as we would like. Now engineering researchers at the University of Cincinnati are doing something about that.

The researchers are finding ways to take energy from the sun and carbon from the air to create new forms of biofuels, thanks to a semi-tropical frog species. Their results have just been published online in “Artificial Photosynthesis in Ranaspumin-2 Based Foam” (March 5, 2010) in the journal “Nano Letters.” (It will be a cover story for the print edition in the fall.)

Research Assistant Professor David Wendell, student Jacob Todd and College of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Carlo Montemagno co-authored the paper, based on research in Montemagno’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Their work focused on making a new artificial photosynthetic material which uses plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes, trapped within a foam housing, to produce sugars from sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Foam was chosen because it can effectively concentrate the reactants but allow very good light and air penetration. The design was based on the foam nests of a semi-tropical frog called the Tungara frog, which creates very long-lived foams for its developing tadpoles.

“The advantage for our system compared to plants and algae is that all of the captured solar energy is converted to sugars, whereas these organisms must divert a great deal of energy to other functions to maintain life and reproduce,” says Wendell. “Our foam also uses no soil, so food production would not be interrupted, and it can be used in highly enriched carbon dioxide environments, like the exhaust from coal-burning power plants, unlike many natural photosynthetic systems.”

He adds, “In natural plant systems, too much carbon dioxide shuts down photosynthesis, but ours does not have this limitation due to the bacterial-based photo-capture strategy.”

There are many benefits to being able to create a plant-like foam.

“You can convert the sugars into many different things, including ethanol and other biofuels,” Wendell explains. “And it removes carbon dioxide from the air, but maintains current arable land for food production.”

eureka moment for cheap coal gasification

GlobeandMail | Scientists in Texas say they have found a way to convert coal into gasoline at a cost of less than $30 (U.S.) a barrel - with zero release of pollutants.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) announced last month that they have developed a clean way to turn the cheapest kind of coal - lignite, common in Texas - into synthetic crude. "We go from that [lignite coal] to this really nice liquid," Brian Dennis, a member of the research team, said in describing the synthetic crude that can be refined into gasoline.

Assuming that these Texas folk are correct, this advance in technology could represent a historic moment in energy production - for Canada as well as for the United States. Canada has huge reserves of lignite coal in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan (which already gets 70 per cent of its electricity from this common coal) - not to mention in Nova Scotia.

The Texas researchers, who worked on the project for about 18 months, expect the cost to drop further. "We're improving the cost every day. We started off some time ago at an uneconomical $17,000 a barrel. Today, we're at ... $28.84 a barrel," Rick Billo, UTA's dean of engineering, told an Austin television reporter.

Texas lignite coal sells for $18 a tonne. The coal conversion technology uses one tonne of coal to produce 1.5 barrels of crude oil. One barrel of crude produces 42 U.S. gallons of gasoline. In other words, $18 worth of coal yields 63 gallons of gasoline: 0.28 cents a gallon.

In her report of the announcement, Dallas Morning News energy writer Elizabeth Souder said the U.S. government has approved construction of a small-scale microrefinery to test the UTA lab-based breakthrough. This prototype microrefinery should be in operation by year-end. "While the process doesn't create renewable fuel, it would create a domestic source for vehicle fuel and plastics," she reported.