Court Backs EPA on Clean Air Act, Cross State Pollution Regulation | New Republic

Court Backs EPA on Clean Air Act, Cross State Pollution Regulation | New Republic:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a key decision, written by Ginsburg, upholding a regulation called the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.
The “good neighbor rule,” as it’s come to be known, seeks to address
air pollution that travels hundreds of miles away from its original
source—say, from Ohio to New England—by
requiring about 1,000 aging coal plans in 28 states to cut the harmful
pollutants that create soot and smog. The Environmental Protection
Agency administers the regulation, using authority it has from the 1972
Clean Air Act.



The
ruling was a rebuke to the fossil fuel industry, which has fought these
regulations, and to a lower federal court, which in 2012 rejected them
as unconstitutional. It did not appear to be a close call. Chief Justice
John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the decision, giving it
the imprimatur of a six-justice majority. Justices Antonin Scalia and
Clarence Thomas dissented, suggesting the pollution control scheme
verged on Marxism. (Justice Samuel Alito recused himself, presumably
because of a conflict of interest.)

An End to New York's War on Condoms? - Hit & Run : Reason.com

An End to New York's War on Condoms? - Hit & Run : Reason.com: In a 2012 report from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center (UJC) and The PROS Network, half of sex workers surveyed said they sometimes didn't carry condoms for fear of law enforcement repercussions or had unprotected sex after police had confiscated condoms. "It's not a myth," Sienna Baskin, co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the UJC, told The Village Voice last year. "The practice of using condoms as evidence is very prevalent in New York."

But this isn't a police practice limited to New York. Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh are just a few cities where condoms can still be used as evidence. San Francisco only recently ended the practice. Carrying condoms is still criminalized in all of Louisiana and North Carolina.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Welcome to the Finger-Wagging Olympics | TIME.com

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Welcome to the Finger-Wagging Olympics | TIME.com:



He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years,
preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did
nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with
Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope.
Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?




Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private,
intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we
just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy
in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt
Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that
Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape
is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice
to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves
on it.




Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But
he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil. In our quest for social
justice, we shouldn’t lose sight that racism is the true enemy. He’s
just another jerk with more money than brains.

Questlove on How Hip-Hop Failed Black America -- Vulture

Questlove on How Hip-Hop Failed Black America -- Vulture: Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He didn't know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as music director for Anita Baker. But if I’m going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, I’m going to have to be clear with myself that marvel is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?

Barak: Peace With Palestinians Or Apartheid

Barak: Peace With Palestinians Or Apartheid: (AP) JERUSALEM - Israel's defense minister warned Tuesday that if Israel does not achieve a peace deal with the Palestinians, it will be either a binational state or an undemocratic apartheid state.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak's comments came in an address to a security conference north of Tel Aviv.

Israeli leaders rarely use the term "apartheid" in connection to the Palestinians. The term, however, has been used by Israel's harshest critics to accuse it of using apartheid tactics against the Palestinians.

"The simple truth is, if there is one state" including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, "it will have to be either binational or undemocratic. ... if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

Egyptian Democracy's Death Sentence - Bloomberg View

Egyptian Democracy's Death Sentence - Bloomberg View: An Egyptian court today sentenced 683 people to death in a trial that lasted about five minutes. This was both a travesty of justice and an embarrassment for the U.S., which just last week released some of the military aid it froze last year to protest Egypt's human-rights abuses.

For those who may have been distracted by other issues lately: About 1,150 people died in the military coup that deposed the country's first democratically chosen president last July. Since then, as many as 19,000 protesters have been arrested or have disappeared at the hands of security forces.

No one has been charged in connection with those killings. Egypt's courts did, however, sentence 529 people to death last month in connection with the death of a policeman. (That trial lasted about four hours, or 27 seconds per death sentence.) Meanwhile, a new draft anti-terrorism law is so vague and broad that the crackdown is likely to become even more bloody.

Reformation or Revolution? A Review of God and the Gay Christian | Canon and Culture

Reformation or Revolution? A Review of God and the Gay Christian | Canon and Culture: Imagine a book with a thesis that calls into question 2,000 years of established Christian theology and biblical exegesis. It recasts basic principles of biblical anthropology and human embodiment. It also puts two millennia of faithful obedience to divine revelation on the side of injustice and ignorance. Now, Christians are accustomed to either non-Christians or liberal Christians making claims of this nature, but not from individuals supposedly nestled confidently within the evangelical camp.

This week a book making such claims is hitting bookshelves written by a young author named Matthew Vines.

Readers may not be familiar with Matthew Vines. But you will need to know him, for the movement he is leading aims to change the way the evangelical church thinks about human sexuality. At the very least, his work will help advance the coming rupture in the evangelical church at large over issues of sexuality.

Sarah Palin's Barbarism | National Review Online

Sarah Palin's Barbarism | National Review Online: Torture — waterboarding being something reasonable people may consider to constitute it — is and should be a question of grave moral consequence for Christians, and is for any Catholic familiar with the Catechism. Palin wasn’t even just jokingly comparing a serious violation of human dignity into one of the most important transcendental recognitions of it – she was mounting an expansive defense of something near torture, on the grounds that our prisoners ”would obviously have information on plots,” and therefore ought to, apparently, be subjected to a horrible practice not as a morally necessary last resort but a habit of quotidian intimidation. There’s a word for that kind of practice: barbaric. The Greeks used to use it to describe the other guys.

Nigerian abducted girls' families fast losing hope of rescue | World news | theguardian.com

Nigerian abducted girls' families fast losing hope of rescue | World news | theguardian.com: Hamma Balumai, a farmer whose 16-year-old daughter Hauwa was snatched, pooled his savings with other parents and ventured on a two-day trek into the forest this week. "Even my wife was begging to come as she is so disturbed she hasn't been able to eat anything. Our daughter Hauwa is only 16 years old and she has been missing for 11 days now," he told the Guardian.

The parents turned around only after being warned by communities in the forest that their rag-tag group, armed with machetes and knives, would be gunned down by the militants, who wield sophisticated weapons.

not completely sure on this

Why Affirmative Action No Longer Works - David Frum - The Atlantic: Lyndon Johnson’s America was a country slashed by a color line of racial domination and subordination. Even the most affluent black citizen of the United States could expect to face humiliating economic and social discrimination. Meanwhile, the white majority overwhelmingly regarded itself as “middle class,” standing on a more or less equal footing with other “middle-class” whites.

Today’s America is a country whose class distinctions are growing as extreme as those in Edwardian England. Johnson’s assumption that non-black Americans all enjoyed more or less equivalent opportunities “to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities” seems poignantly out of date. A white skin may still correlate less with poverty than does a darker skin. But that skin alone long ago ceased to convey much in the way of privilege to the less affluent half of white America. It’s true, even Oprah can encounter rude treatment in a Swiss boutique. Day in, day out, however, William Julius Wilson’s prediction has been vindicated and more than vindicated: In 21st-century America, class trumps race.

The top spook’s stupid gag order | Jack Shafer

The top spook’s stupid gag order | Jack Shafer: Directive 119 increases the insularity of the national security state, making the public less safe, not more. Until this directive was issued, intelligence community employees could provide subtext and context for the stories produced by the national security press without breaking the law. Starting now, every news story about the national security establishment that rates disfavor with the national security establishment — no matter how innocuous — will rate a full-bore investigation of sources by authorities.

Directive 119 achieves through executive order much of what the spooks tried to accomplish legislatively in the summer of 2012, when the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a measure that would have banned background briefings between reporters and all intelligence officials except “press officers and agency directors or deputy directors,” as Reuters correspondent Mark Hosenball reported. Such briefings have been routine during most recent presidential administrations, Hosenball wrote. An avalanche of protests smothered the measure, killing it until Clapper resurrected elements of it in Directive 119.

Doing Well by Doing Bad | Political Violence @ a Glance

Doing Well by Doing Bad | Political Violence @ a Glance: Similarly, besieged governments typically insist that they will not cave to threats and violence from terrorists and thugs — Ronald Reagan famously stated in the 1980 presidential debates that there would be “no negotiation with terrorists of any kind”. But is this what actually happens during violent internal conflicts? Do the bad guys lose — as we would like — or do their underhanded tactics pay off by forcing concessions from state leaders?

Two recent studies present similarly unfortunate findings that suggest that the bad guys often do better than we would like. Specifically, these analyses provide evidence that insurgent groups that rely on terror and other forms of civilian targeting are actually more likely to achieve their political goals — at least up to a point.

Pain | VQR Online

Pain | VQR Online: That evening, my father pulled to the side of County Road B, halfway between work and home. He stopped the car on the gravel shoulder, parked neatly, turned off the engine. The Wisconsin winter stretched out on both sides of him, the gray dark, the endless, flat fields stubbled with chewed-up stalks of corn. He sat sweating and hurting, staring up at the red button. All these years later, I’m still struggling to understand why he didn’t just reach up, press it, and speak that single word: “Help.”

He taught me that the worst, the weakest, the most shameful thing you could do was indulge your pain—​swallow it down, don’t say a word. You didn’t talk about it; you certainly didn’t write about it. His methods killed him, but he did with his pain only what he’d been taught to do, all he knew how to do.

Now the question remains: What will I do with mine?

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest - NYTimes.com

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest - NYTimes.com: Median per capita income was $18,700 in the United States in 2010 (which translates to about $75,000 for a family of four after taxes), up 20 percent since 1980 but virtually unchanged since 2000, after adjusting for inflation. The same measure, by comparison, rose about 20 percent in Britain between 2000 and 2010 and 14 percent in the Netherlands. Median income also rose 20 percent in Canada between 2000 and 2010, to the equivalent of $18,700.
Continue reading the main story

The most recent year in the LIS analysis is 2010. But other income surveys, conducted by government agencies, suggest that since 2010 pay in Canada has risen faster than pay in the United States and is now most likely higher. Pay in several European countries has also risen faster since 2010 than it has in the United States.

Tehran the secret party town | World news | The Guardian

Tehran the secret party town | World news | The Guardian: Most of the time, however, they are simple gatherings where friends and acquaintances gather in search of release from daily pressures. Nastaran, a 33-year-old translator, says throwing regular parties in her two-bedroom central Tehran apartment gives her something to look forward to as she goes through the weekday grind. "I get up after 6, splash some water on my face and head out into the traffic. In the evenings, if I'm lucky, I make it home by 8, eat dinner and go to bed. If I didn't have this" - she says, raising up her glass of bootleg liquor - "what kind of life would I have?"

Amtin, 35, a regular user of party drugs and hallucinogenics, puts it another way.



After engaging his listener in a 15-minute lecture on the guidelines of LSD use, he suddenly stops short. "You know how it is here," he says, his tone turning apologetic. "With so much pressure from the outside, sometimes you need to find a way to immigrate, at least internally."

Argument preview: Free TV, at a bargain price? : SCOTUSblog

Argument preview: Free TV, at a bargain price? : SCOTUSblog: As long ago as 1931, the Supreme Court interpreted those words from the perspective of what the broadcast audience was or would be for a program, and on how they got it. ”The parties agree,” the Court said then, “that the owner of a private radio receiving set who in his own home invites friends to hear a musical composition which is being broadcast, would not be liable for infringement [of the music's copyright]. For even if this be deemed a performance, it is neither public nor for profit.”

In that case, however, the Court went on to rule that the owner of the LaSalle Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, who put radios in each room so the occupants could pick up a popular song from a master receiver in the hotel, had infringed on the copyright for that music.

That opinion established two concepts for broadcast copyright law: the nature of the middleman in delivering the entertainment counts, but so does the identity of the end user, or listener.

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society: The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

Henrich’s work with the ultimatum game was an example of a small but growing countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition.

Three Springs | whathasgood

Three Springs | whathasgood: As a young high altitude expedition worker, the more you carry, the more you are paid. There is a per kilogram equation for payment, and there is value, both in hard cash and in securing future work, in proving you are good. If you prove you’re good, you get hired next season, possibly recruited by one of the better companies, climbing literally up the mountain and figuratively up the ranks. The best way to do all this is to move fast and carry a lot. And the best way to do that is to dance, possibly unclipped, across the icefall ladders.



And yet. This one potential factor, this one whisper of motivation, the veteran mountaineers did not make mention of when the article posed the question: “Why did Namgya skip a seemingly simple, and potentially life-saving step?”

The Principal of Columbine, Frank DeAngelis, is Retiring - Esquire

The Principal of Columbine, Frank DeAngelis, is Retiring - Esquire:

Mr. D’s job
of reconciling the past with the present and the future is a difficult
one. Because, as the students will readily attest, people are uncommonly
weird about Columbine. Tour buses stop to let their riders
snap pictures during the school day. Visitors take selfies in front of
the school’s sign. Travelers who’ve gotten lost looking for the memorial
end up wandering around the parking lot. The memorial was built in
2007, in nearby Clement Park. It was set away from the school to deter
tourists from bothering students, but that didn’t work. They keep
coming. To them, the school itself is the monument. 

“There was a caravan of tourists,” says
Megan, seventeen, a senior, recalling a recent instance. “About twenty
of them right out there in the parking lot—and they were wearing aloha
shirts. I wondered, Why is this a tourist spot?

The city of Decatur, a flourishing model of urban planning, is a “30-year overnight success story” | ArtsATL

The city of Decatur, a flourishing model of urban planning, is a “30-year overnight success story” | ArtsATL: The decision by the citizens of Decatur in the early 1800s was a fortuitous one. While they could not have envisioned the unbridled growth the terminus would bring, their decision allowed for this inner-city suburban enclave to retain the charm and character that now draws people to its streets. The decision by the citizens of Decatur in 1982 was deliberate. In naming Decatur a “great neighborhood,” the American Planning Association recognized as much, attributing its success to “more than three decades . . . of planning, commitment, patience, and investment.” The city, and specifically the planners who helped create and advocate for the plan in the early 1980s, have been in it for the long haul.

At the State of the City address, the mayor recognized Menne for 30 years of service and Saxon for 35 years. Both received standing ovations. As Menne said that day, Decatur is a “30-year overnight success story.”