Gil Friend: Politics

Quote of the Day

Mon, 29 May 2006 18:22:57 GMT

Thanks to Karen Seeh for this one:

However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.

Wendell Berry, "Conservation Is Good Work," Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1991

Social Investment, Social Capital and Social Action

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 05:29:15 GMT

I just posted my report from the SRI in the Rockies conference at as my 'Sustainability Sundays' column at WorldChanging.

Perception is key to the investment game, of course. The profit opportunity lives in the value gradients between how different people evaluate risk and opportunity, and hence the value of securities. If I think global warming, toxic products and human rights are likely to be big deals, and you don't, we're going to place very different financial bets. Because SRI is a movement as well as an industry, the investors want to move markets -- like LEED has done in the building industry -- as well as profit from them.

The posting includes a long summary of Gar Alperovitz's keynote -- worth reading.

'The hopeful assumption, during dark political times, that ultimately the pendulum will swing back -- that's complacency.' Believing that the best we can do, in the face of overwhelming trends against us, is help make things a bit less bad -- 'I don't believe that either,' he said. His challenge: the possibility of slowly developing alternative paradigm that's beyond capitalism in its traditional form: significantly broadening ownership of capital -- 'not socialism or capitalism, but a new form.' 'Just possibly,' he suggested, 'we're living at time when the beginning ground work for something very different, very positive, might begin to transcend traditional models.'

Happy Independence Day

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 17:37:06 GMT

A perfect day, somewhere between sports events, picnics and fireworks, to re-read the Declaration of Independence. A most remarkable document, well worth reading once a year, 'whether you need it or not.' (Echo of that old joke about cowboys taking a bath once a week, whether...) A stunning and still compelling piece of work, undiminished by any of Jefferson's flaws. (My day includes all of those, plus some serious planning -- something I'm investing lots more time in these days, and very pleased with the ROI -- plus hopefully catching up on the long lapses in blogrhythm, while still wondering how some people manage to blog so much and still have lives.... Oh... THAT's it!) BTW, as long as you're reading declarations, have a look at John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and the Sustainable Business Declaration of Leadership I wrote for the Sustainable Business Rating System initiative.

Accord discord

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 06:42:30 GMT

Joel Makower has a somewhat more jaded view of the Urban Environmental Accords. But some of the biggest urban environmental problems aren't addressed. Concern about environmental justice issues -- those that inequitably affect the poorest urban dwellers around the world -- aren't evident in the accords. (Read this together with the nearby posting on Van Jones and the 'Green Jobs. Not Jails.' campaign for some gritty perspective on why the jade.)

Urban Environmental Accords

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 01:43:39 GMT

Echoing the 50 nations that signed on to the UN Charter in San Francisco 60 years ago, the mayors of 50 cities signed the Urban Environmental Accords in San Francisco today, ending the week-long World Environment Day events. The accords: - identify 21 issues:

Energy
Renewable Energy | Energy Efficiency | Climate Change

Waste Reduction
Zero Waste | Manufacturer Responsibility | Consumer Responsibility

Urban Design
Green Building | Urban Planning | Slums

Urban Nature
Parks | Habitat Restoration | Wildlife

Transportation
Public Transportation | Clean Vehicles | Reducing Congestion

Environmental Health
Toxics Reduction | Healthy Food Systems | Clean Air

Water
Drinking Water Access | Source Water Conservation | Waste Water Reduction

- call on cities to take three actions a year to meet specific goals for each, and - will award one to four stars based on how many goals are achieved by 2012. Detail on other WED events to come soon.

CSR in the Cross-Hairs

Fri, 13 May 2005 17:37:39 GMT

[SustainableBusiness.com]: Recent months have seen a fierce and growing counter-attack against corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics reform.... The stars in this dramatic fight: [California Governer Arnold] Schwarzenegger, squaring off against corporate reform leader Phil Angelides, the California state treasurer who for years has used $300 billion in state pension funds to launch salvos demanding governance and ethical reforms from corporations.

How could anyone be opposed to corporate reform, you might wonder, after the raft - nay flotilla - of corporate scandals and CEP perp walks of recent years? Well, you wouldn't have been following the musings of David Hirschmann, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who wrote cease-and-desist letters to state pension funds in New York and Connecticut, accusing them of 'working to advance the social investment agenda of organized labor.' Or of the American Enterprise Institute, whose economic policy director declared that CalPERS 'is abusing the public trust in a manner as serious and grave as any I have seen.'

Or of radical right mastermind Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform -- 'Field Marshall' of the Bush plan and source of the famous battlecry, I don't want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub -- who said, regarding public pension funds: 'Just 115 people control $1 trillion,' he said. 'We want to take that power and destroy it.'

Which puts a very different perspective on Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposal that state pension funds be broken up into private, 401(k)-style accounts. Broken up into millions of accounts, that capital won't have the aggregrated power to influence corporate behavior in the way that CalPERS has been able to do.

Here we get to the heart of the Norquistian agenda: to fundamentally delegitimize government (they actually call it 'the beast,' not 'of the people, by the people and for the people'!) and the very notion of people pooling their resources to protect their common interests.

That, despite this:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

End of soapbox. (For the moment.)

United gets OK to dump four pension plans

Wed, 11 May 2005 14:49:09 GMT

[Business Week]: United Airlines gained a significant financial victory with court approval to dump its four pension plans but faces a tough challenge to win back the support of angry employees.

Oh, we do so like to carry on about the 'rule of law' and the 'sanctity of contracts' and the 'importance of trust' and 'a man's word is his bond.' But sometimes it can all be so inconveeeeeeenient...

PS: 'Taxpayers had better buckle up because we will be in for a bumpy ride of bailout after bailout, as more and more corporations dump their pension plan obligations on the PBGC,' said U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., referring to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. that already is operating at a more than $23 billion deficit.

At least the PBGC will get a bit of equity -- better than the total giveway that so many government subsidies turn out to be.

Enlibra Principles - 'moving toward balance'

Tue, 10 May 2005 03:21:50 GMT

I just stumbled across The Enlibra Principles (on the US Environmental Protection Agency site):

The Enlibra Doctrine is an approach to environmental stewardship that was co-authored by former Utah Governor and later EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt and former Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon. Enlibra, from the Latin, means 'move toward balance.' Enlibra is based on the dual concepts of balance and stewardship, and is built upon principles of flexibility, innovation, partnership and collaboration. The philosophy emphasizes collaboration instead of polarization, national standards and neighborhood solutions, markets instead of mandates, solutions that transcend political boundaries, and other common sense ideas that will accelerate environmental progress.

National Standards, Neighborhood Solutions - Assign responsibilities at the right level

Collaboration, Not Polarization - Use collaborative processes to break down barriers and find solutions

Reward Results, Not Programs - Move to a performance-based, instead of process-based, system

Science For Facts, Process for Priorities - Separate subjective choices from objective data gathering

Markets Before Mandates - Pursue economic incentives whenever appropriate
Change a Heart, Change a Nation - Environmental education and understanding are crucial
Recognition of Benefits and Costs - Make sure all decisions affecting infrastructure, development and environment are fully informed

Solutions Transcend Political Boundaries - Use appropriate geographic boundaries to resolve problems

There's a paragraph more (not excerpted here) for each of those points, which make it all sound less platitudinous. Does anyone know more about the history -- and the real impact -- of these principles?

(Leavitt of course presided over much of the Bush EPA's stealth deregulation program. Kitzhaber, OTOH, presided over some of the country's most forward looking sustainability initiatives. I'm always intrigued by strange bedfellows.)

The New Left: Corporate America

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:34:40 GMT

[MarketWatch]: The New Left: Corporate America - Picking up the slack on issues from environment to AIDS

Corporate America, it seems, is charging in where liberal government is refusing to tread, supporting more social programs to help not only employees but also people in their community, throughout the country and all over the world.

Democrats might take note: This may be the hole in the 'red state' defense that could open up the field for a strong player in the 2008 election.

The article highlights Nike, Gap, Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, Home Depot, Starbucks, General Mills and Microsoft as well out in front of government requirements on issues ranging for gay rights and labor rights to health care, diversity and the environment.

Take global warming. The entire semiconductor industry and 50 utilities have voluntarily agreed to reduce 'greenhouse' gas emissions at the same time the U.S. government refuses to endorse the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for mandated emission reduction.

I'm not sure I'd use the left-right classification, but the backfield's been in motion on this for quite a few years. Many reasons: activist pressure is one, but only one; employee attraction and retention is probably far more significant, as are competitiveness and license to operate issues; direct economic advantages may be harder to prove, but lots of people -- investors as well as managers -- are increasingly sure they're there.

As I've been saying: Boards of Directors, CEOs, and CFOs - not environmentalists - should be leading the sustainability revolution.

Green Guerillas?

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:37:38 GMT

John Robb is not a proponent of terrorism and guerilla warfare, but he is an astute analyst of it. Neither the White House nor the anti-Iraq War folks are paying him enough attention, IMHO.

Here's what he said recently about potential vulnerabilities of our current energy systems:

[Global Guerillas]: A central theme of global guerrilla warfare is that the centralized systems we rely upon in modern nation-states are unable to withstand even a rudimentary low tech assault. The environmental movement picked up on this vulnerability for their own purposes. Their message: clean energy is more secure energy. This is accurate. Clean energy requires decentralized production and is by its nature more secure....

Eco-terrorism isn't new. It is, however, typically ineffective. This report [Cascadia Scorecard] points to another potential scenario. If eco-activists adopt global guerrilla tactics, they could coerce a rapid move to clean energy alternatives. Small but extremely effective (high ROI) attacks on the energy corridors leading to target regions, would quickly increase the costs of conventional energy such that clean power alternatives would become extremely attractive. This would be dictated by a direct economic comparison (costs) as well as indirect factors such as reliability of delivery. This systems sabotage tax would induce a tipping point in energy market equilibria towards green alternatives if it is extended over a long period (longer than one season) and is of a sufficient level. See the brief Urban Takedowns for more on how a terrorism tax can impact market equilibria.

Brain core meltdowns

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 05:28:34 GMT

[WorldChanging]: Joel Makower comments on Nuclear Now! How clean, green atomic energy can stop global warming by Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss. Many comments there (amazing how nuclear gets the blood boiling), including mine:

1. '...if you don't count the high security costs of protecting nuclear plants, the environmental damage of uranium mining, and the incalculable costs of safely storing nuclear wastes...' Not to mention the cost of decommissioning nuclear power plants. How much you want to bet that 'capitalist' utility companies try to foist that cost off onto taxpayers? 2. The 'nuclear is better than coal' argument is another specious example of the trap of binary thinking that so plagues 'advanced' societies. 3. I fear we will need to get ready for a flurry perverse, eco-flavored assaults on our reason. Next, how about tax penalties for fuel efficient cars? I kid you not.

This last link, reporting on a pilot in Oregon (a state that we thought was leading the sustainability charge) turns a potentially useful idea -- capacity based pricing of freeway access -- into a stunningly backasswards response to the potential problem that 'As more and more hybrids hit the road, cash-strapped states are warning of rough roads ahead.' Apparently these folks never heard of feebates.

Speaking of maps

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 04:24:05 GMT

[Social Design Notes]: Despite increasing consolidated and homogenous media and increasingly pervasive Internet access, ideology exists spatially.

Six links in that posting. Click 'em all. You'll see a fascinating range of cartographic interpretations on the Bush-Kerry election, which offer some very different perspectives on what the election actually disclosed about the mind of the country -- and which suggest very different political strategies for the Democrats. Consider the difference (these maps courtesy of Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, University of Michigan) between this:
and this:

and this:

In this map, it appears that only a rather small area is taken up by true red counties, the rest being mostly shades of purple with patches of blue in the urban areas.

Oh, LOOK out!

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 01:19:33 GMT

ACLU Pizza and Defanging 'the Matrix'

Coming to a homeland near you, unless...

Not that this will help...

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 22:47:36 GMT

Corporate Welfare Runs Amok. Reforms to the corporate tax system must be debated on their merits, not under cover of some phony label like 'job creation.' [NYT > Opinion]

Congress's ostensible purpose for allowing the holiday is to unleash a flood of money for job creation.... But few of the approved uses for the repatriated funds - such as debt redemption, advertising and a catchall category of 'financial stabilization' - will lead directly, if at all, to more jobs. One approved use - the ability to spend the money to buy other companies - would be more likely to create layoffs, as corporate acquisitions usually do.

Many of the early entrants in this opportunity -- Johnson & Johnson, Schering-Plough, Eli Lilly -- and others that are considering this tax-free 'repatriation' of profits -- Pfizer, Hewlett Packard, Intel -- are leaders in 'corporate social responsibility'. Repatriation is legal, of course. But is it responsible?

Trade deficits, reality deficits

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 22:30:40 GMT

[John Robb]: WSJ. The US trade deficit rose to $60.3 billion in November (is there a link to the elections?). A new record. Despite a sinking dollar, the sale of US goods abroad dropped (down 2.3%). This is terrible news. The relative performance of the US vs. all other nations is on a slippery downward slope. While we focus on military power, the rest of the world is focused on economic power.

Deficits we run with major trading partners. Here's the major problem areas (per month!):
    [apple]     China. $16.63 billion. Down slightly.
    [apple]     Japan. $7.29 billion. Up big.
    [apple]     EU. $7.72 billion. Up big.
    [apple]     Canada. $7.3 billion. Up big.
    [apple]     Mexico. $3.89 billion. Down.

Seems this should concern us -- and the President -- much more than the Social Security 'crisis'

World views, worlds apart

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 03:42:54 GMT

Two very interesting, and very different, big picture views of our current world and current situation have come across my view recently. Both are worth your attention.

Meta-historian William Irwin Thompson, writes, with his typical grand sweep, of Al Qaeda, the Neocons, and the Transition from Nation-State to Noetic Polity in Ocean Arks International's Annals of Earth (but available on line here, about 2/3 down the page):

This new historical situation is one in which we are shifting from the era of a global industrial economy of territorial nation-states to a planetary cultural-ecology of noetic polities (a noetic polity is one based on consciousness and not territorial identify). The war against Islamicist terrorism is not a war against a territorial nation-state; it is a conflict against a noetic polity that seeks to destroy the secular modernism of the industrial nation-state to replace it with regional Caliphates in a single global Islamic civilization. In a medieval Caliphate, the leader rules for life, so it is not surprising that modern-day Caliphs like Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, and Hassad in Syria, rule for decades and are not subject to the Western politics of election and re-election.

Paradoxically, enemies tend to become like one another through conflict. "We become what we hate...." The American soldiers that died in Iraq did not die "defending their country"; they died defending Cheney and Bush's interests in Halliburton and the Carlyle Group. These neocon corporate managers, very much like the privateers and pirates that helped Queen Elizabeth create a postbaronial world of naval power, are offshore pirates that care as little for the entire nation, as Texan Enron cared for the state of California it plundered. Historically, these neocon managers have moved beyond national patriotism, and only have need of patriotic propaganda and national armies to provide them with the soldiers they need to advance their mafia Don aims. So when Saddam Hussein was not co-operating with Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was decided by the Defense Policy Board of Pearle, Woolsley, and Wolfowitz to take him out but call this mafia hit "the installation of democracy in Iraq" -- this even before Bush Jr. was chosen by the party to be its publicist.

From another coast (or another planet) Victor Davis Hanson offers Into the Tar Pits: Dinosaurs either evolve or die in National Review Online.

What has happened? Sometime around the 1980s, the Right saw the demise of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to evolve beyond realpolitik to promote not just anti-Communism but grassroots democracy, coupled with free-market globalism from Eastern Europe to Latin America and Asia. In contrast, the hard Left stayed in its knee-jerk suspicion of the West and continued to give a pass to authoritarians from Cuba to Iran who professed socialism, thinking that the world was a static zero-sum game in which somebody's gain spelled another's loss -- oblivious that real wealth could be created by a change of mentality and technology and not mere exploitation....

Action and results, not rhetoric and intentions, are what matter. Cease blaming others for declining popularity. There is neither a Karl Rove conspiracy nor an envisioned red-state theocracy. No, the problem with our Left is what killed the dinosaurs: a desire to plod on to oblivion in a rapidly evolving world.

I've been keeeping the politic rhetoric limited on this blog, and the focus more professional, for a variety of reasons. But I'm expecting that both these pieces will intrigue you and both will piss you off. And maybe generate some new and uncomfortable thoughts, which is good medicine in this day and age.

So have at 'em.

Tsunamis, global warming, 'spin and hype'

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 05:52:59 GMT

Joel Makower blogs on the recent kerfluffle about the tsunami and global warming,

Problem is, I couldn't find a single claim -- by an "environmental expert" or anyone else -- made in the past week that connects the Indian Ocean tragedy with global warming...

A brilliant ploy: Condemn a ridiculous and outrageous claim by your opponents, or associate them with something for which they had no possible responsibility, thereby branding them as silly at best, dangerous at worse, despite the fact that you pretty much made the whole thing up.

and gave me a chance to piggyback my thoughts in his comments:

I was thinking the same thing. Closest thing I could find to that 'claim' was these two paragraphs at Finance Gate:

The company called for measures to be taken to counter the climate change that in Munich Re[base ']s opinion was responsible for the disaster.

'The terrible effects spreading all around the Indian Ocean and reaching as far as the Horn of Africa are a further reminder of the global threat from natural catastrophes,' executive board member Stefan Heyd said in the reinsurer[base ']s annual disaster report.

Note that the assertion in the first paragraph is not what the Munich Re executive said, in the quote in the second paragraph.

Christmas Eve perspective (2)

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 15:40:07 GMT

[The Darwin Project]: In the Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote only twice of "survival of the fittest" -- but 95 times about love! 92 times about moral sensitivity. And 200 times about brain and mind.

Suppression over 100 years of the real Darwin has led to the social, political, economic, scientific, educational, moral and spiritual mess we are in today.

The site features the book The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution, an anthology of chapters by David Loye, Ervin Laszlo, Rianne Eisler and others, which sees Darwin in a very different perspective than how he's come to be seen, and used, by modern/capitalist/technology+growth focused society.

...consider the implications for both theory and society of the fact that in Descent only nine times does Darwin write of competition, but nearly three times as often -- that is 24 times -- of mutuality or mutual aid, which was the root concept of that time for what today we call cooperation. Or of the fact he writes of sympathy 61 times. And then this, most astounding and perhaps of the greatest long range importance. For in line with the rediscovery of the theory of the now immensely popular Charles S. Peirce -- in which Pierce (1992) identifies evolutionary love as one of the three prime principles for evolution -- in Descent Darwin similarly writes of love 95 times!...

Darwin in fact not only lashes out at the idea of blind chance. 'The understanding,' he writes with rare vehemence, 'revolts at such a conclusion.' He also goes still further in asserting that our evolution is moral directional. Most specifically he tells us: 'Looking to future generations we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger...and virtue will be triumphant.'

Is this nothing more than the delusions of late Victorian optimism? Elsewhere he again insists 'the social and moral qualities' will 'tend slowly to advance and diffuse throughout the world.' And still again -- inescapably directional in regard to the billions of years of the evolution of life on this planet, and the millions of years of the direct evolutionary line leading to our own species -- there is this. It is the 'fact of our having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed in perfection here,' Darwin tells us, 'that gives us hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.'

Christmas Eve perspective (1)

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 15:27:23 GMT

[James Carroll, in the Boston Globe, via Shalom Center]:

The Politics of the Christmas Story

THE SINGLE most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas. The child who was born in Bethlehem represented a drastic political challenge to the imperial power of Rome. The nativity story is told to make the point that Rome is the enemy of God, and in Jesus, Rome's day is over....

In modern times, religion and politics began to be understood as occupying separate spheres, and the nativity story became spiritualized and sentimentalized, losing its political edge altogether. "Peace" replaced resistance as the main motif. The baby Jesus was universalized, removed from his decidedly Jewish context, and the narrative's explicit critiques of imperial dominance and of wealth were blunted.

This is how it came to be that Christmas in America has turned the nativity of Jesus on its head....

China and Sudan

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 00:28:32 GMT

(and Iran.)

Another indicator of the tough geopolitical times ahead.

[Sudan Tribune]: But the Chinese laborers are protected: They work under the vigilant gaze of Sudanese government troops armed largely with Chinese-made weapons -- a partnership of the world's fastest-growing oil consumer with a pariah state accused of fostering genocide in its western Darfur region....

The pressure to find new sources of oil has grown as China has swelled into the world's second-largest consumer and as production at the largest of its domestic fields is declining. According to government statistics, China's imports have grown from about 6 percent of its oil needs a decade ago to roughly one-third today, and are forecast to rise to rise to 60 percent by 2020.

The US imports 53% percent of its oil today (48% net imports). DOE predicts 68% in 2025, and strangely assumes prices at only $30-35 per barrel. What if that price estimate is wrong. What if it's very wrong? What are the potential impacts -- macro-economic, cultural and strategic -- of growing import dependency, rising trade deficits, rising budget deficits, (rising sea levels?), lost access to European markets unwilling to accept lower quality (i.e., toxic) US goods? (I'll address the last factor in a forthcoming article.) What are US business leaders -- espcially those who speak of environmental commitments and social responsbility -- willing to do -- both at the level ofcorporate commitments, strategy and practice and at the level of political engagement -- to protect both their companies and the national economy within which they operate? (Another forthcoming article.)

Oh, and by the way,
China in October signed a $70 billion oil deal with Iran, and the evolving ties between those two countries could complicate U.S. efforts to isolate Iran diplomatically or pressure it to give up its ambitions for nuclear weapons.

[Thanks to John Robb for the sobering link.]

And speaking of privatizing social security

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 05:46:55 GMT

[Krugman/NY Times]: Buying Into Failure

In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

Read your prospectus before voting, folks.

'I see it feelingly'

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 04:48:00 GMT

Pollard again, offering up Bill Moyers' frank and troubling speech on the state of things.

Pollard: And he recently delivered, on receiving the Harvard Medical School Global Environmental Citizen award, what may be the most important speech of the 21st century so far.

Moyers: And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

It's long. I'm not going to excerpt it right now (sleep calls). Read it.

Worldchanging is not always in the direction you expect

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 04:38:51 GMT

What's New in the Legal World? A Growing Campaign to Undo the New Deal. States' rights conservatives are making progress in their drive to restore the narrow view of federal power that predated the New Deal. By By ADAM COHEN. [NYT > Opinion] In pre-1937 America, workers were exploited, factories were free to pollute, and old people were generally poor when they retired. This is not an agenda the public would be likely to sign onto today if it were debated in an election. But conservatives, who like to complain about activist liberal judges, could achieve their anti-New Deal agenda through judicial activism on the right. Judges could use the so-called Constitution-in-Exile to declare laws on workplace safety, environmental protection and civil rights unconstitutional. Another step in a deep and extensive campaign to fundamentally deligitimize government, and the very notion that people can join together collectively -- which is what government is -- to protect their interests. ('We the people of the United States... in order to protect the general welfare...' - remember?) The odd thing about this story: the progressive side of the medical marijuana dispute could be feeding the states' rights conservatives a useful legal precedent.

Forgot to leave home without it

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 06:16:05 GMT

There are also important cases (not just high profile murder cases) at the San Mateo County courthouse -- ones that might even affect you. John Perry Barlow and the 4th Amendment -- you know, the one about unreasonable search and seizure -- take on the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security.

On December 15, at 2:00 pm, I will pay yet another visit to the North San Mateo County Courthouse in South San Francisco. This time I expect I will actually get a chance to plead my case. (Any interested Bay Area BarlowFriendz are invited to attend. It should be pretty decent theater.)

Bush beats Kerry (probably), but physics still trumps politics

Wed, 03 Nov 2004 15:03:39 GMT

Well, this election looks all but done. I'll leave it to others to do the Ohio math, but one thing is clear: regardless of who controls Congress or occupies the White House, we still get to deal with energy physics, which is ruthlessly non-partisan.

An economy addicted to oil (and imported oil at that) is positioning itself for profound market and competitiveness challenges -- especially as other parts of the world continue to move more aggressively to reduce the risks of climate change.

Case in point, renewable energy goals:
- US, 2.5% by 2005
- China, 12% by 2020
- Europe, 20% by 2020, 50% by 2050

Sure is a good thing that US companies -- at least some of them -- are out far ahead of the US government. It's still likely to be a bumpy ride...