Frederick Douglass Said That
Frederick Douglass: “Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”
Life WIthout Parole for Possession of an Ounce of Marijuana after Prior Felony Conviction
That’s correct: according to the New York Times, the law in Mississippi states that the mandatory penalty for possession of an ounce of marijuana is life without parole if you have had prior felony convictions. Alabama has a law that is only slightly less draconian, as I will describe in a moment. Two other states have no penalty at all for possession of marijuana (that is, they have legalized “recreational use” of marijuana). According to federal law, marijuana is a “Schedule I” substance, that is, it has no recognized medical use and represents a danger to its users (precisely what that danger is may be somewhat vague) that is unacceptable.
The Department of Justice has promulgated a memorandum on this subject which appears to suggest that the federal government’s “priorities” are not served by prosecution of individuals for the mere possession of “small amounts” of marijuana. This memorandum is deliberately vague and insists that it does not provide anyone with any defense against being prosecuted, but it does set forward certain specific “priorities” that are intended to guide federal prosecutors when deciding whether to prosecute individual cases. The priorities include “preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors” (the first priority mentioned) and “preventing revenue… from going to criminal enterprises” as well as “preventing drugged driving” among a number of other issues that are plainly of concern to the federal government.
Regardless of the deliberate vagueness of this memorandum, it appears that the federal government’s priorities do not include prosecution of individual possession or use of marijuana. Federal prosecutors have gone after a number of businesses that distribute marijuana, most commonly by threatening the owners of the property on which it is sold. Prosecutors have also attacked large distributors directly, frequently by disrupting the financial basis of their businesses. However, there have not been any federal prosecutions of individual users that I am aware of in some years.
States are extremely variable in their attitude with regards to marijuana use. For example, in Alabama, there is a case that is headed for the federal Supreme Court that was featured on the editorial pages of the New York Times:
There is a 75 year old man in Alabama who is appealing his sentence to the US Supreme Court because the Alabama State Supreme Court upheld his life without parole sentence for possessing 2.8 pounds of raw marijuana that he grew himself (stems, leaves, and all.) He was convicted of armed robbery twenty years ago and served ten years in prison. For that prior conviction, he now is in an Alabama prison for life without parole for growing a weed. His lawyer is appealing on the grounds that his sentence violates the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishments.
It certainly does seem cruel and unusual to sentence someone to life without parole for possession of marijuana without even having any evidence that he intended to sell the stuff. In fact, the trial judge stated that he would not have passed this sentence except that it was mandatory under the law. The state Supreme Court also was reluctant and the chief justice wrote that the sentence was “excessive and unjustified” but he failed to make the logical conclusion that the sentence was cruel and unusual. This is the conclusion that the defendant’s lawyers wish the federal Supreme Court to reach.
It is clear that even the Alabama Supreme Court lacks the mental ability to make obvious conclusions about its own excessive and unjustified laws. The prosecutors are the ones who are most responsible for the absurdly overstuffed prisons in Alabama, but the judges there are elected from prosecutors and they too are complicit in this denial of human rights.
The New York Times (NYT) was so agitated by this sentence that it published an editorial about the case. For the NYT to write an editorial about it, there must have been a notice that it was being appealed to the Supreme Court; further, the NYT must have found the case to be remarkable. Finally, they found the statements of the judge in the trial and the statements of the Alabama Supreme Court justices to be remarkable.
Today, the federal Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the appeal of this man’s life without parole sentence for possession of 2.8 pounds of marijuana plants, stems, leaves, and roots. By the way, the man was apprehended by police who claimed to be searching for stolen bicycles. They didn’t have a warrant, but they did have the “written” permission of the man’s absent son to perform the search– over the man’s objections in person. There is a definite argument in this case whether the police even performed a legal search.
I know Zika virus is important and spreading every day, and I’m tempted to write updates every time I hear something new about it, but there’s no need for me to do that. There’s a website called “Stat” that handles those updates on a daily basis. They’re specialized in medical news as well as other interesting topics, so I will just direct you to that site for the whole story.
For example, Congress has passed a bill offering financial incentives to companies working on Zika drugs, but a White House spokesman likened it to “passing out umbrellas in the advance of a potential hurricane” (according to the Stat post for today.) A more effective bill to fund studies on Zika and other important things won’t get Congress’ attention until September. This sounds like par for the course for today’s Congress.
Stat also has a link to a Wired post today that offers everything you need to know about Zika virus, from the basics to the details– at least, everything we know today. The Wired post refers to another important post: an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that states that the Zika virus definitely causes microcephaly in fetuses infected in the womb, based on all the evidence we have collected to date. Previously, the microcephaly risk was just a hypothesis, but the accumulation of cases and their interpretation has led scientists to confidently state that it is a fact (or at least, a very very very strong theory.)
So, as much as I’d like to draw traffic to my site with Zika posts, like what happened last year with Ebola, I’m going to say now: go to Stat for the full information. I’m going to stick to the esoteric stuff.
The annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’sMauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii jumped by 3.05 parts per million during 2015, the largest year-to-year increase in 56 years of research.
In another first, 2015 was the fourth consecutive year that CO2 grew more than 2 ppm, said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.
“Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,” Tans said. “It’s explosive compared to natural processes.”
Levels of the greenhouse gas were independently measured by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
In February 2016, the average global atmospheric CO2 level stood at 402.59 ppm. Prior to 1800, atmospheric CO2 averaged about 280 ppm.
This web post was made on March 9, almost a month ago, and yet there has been little publicity about this increase in carbon dioxide concentrations– over three parts per million in a year– that dwarfed the usual increase of one part per million per year.
Coal Companies Declaring Bankruptcy
Today I happened upon the website “Climate Denial Crock of the Week” which reports that Peabody Energy, described as ” the world’s largest privately owned coal producer” has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. In the comments section, someone reports that three of the four largest US coal companies have declared bankruptcy in the last week. This site is definitely work a look: ClimateCrocks.
Apparently, the straw that broke Peabody’s back was their purchase of coal assets in Australia. There has been a drop in energy and metals prices since mid-2014, related to slowing in the economies of China and Brazil. In 2011, Peabody did a $5.1 billion leveraged buyout of Australia’s MacArthur Coal, which had reserves of 2.26 billion tonnes of coal in four open pit mines producing over 6 million tonnes of metallurgical coal (used for making steel) a year (these figures from Wikipedia.)
The Washington Post attributed Peabody’s bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy of 45% of the US coal-producing industry, to competition from cheap natural gas in the US market. Natural gas has suddenly become very cheap because of fracking technology. The coal bankruptcies have occurred before US regulations, including the “Clean Power Plan”, could go into effect, so the popular turning away from fossil fuels has not been the cause of the coal industry’s troubles.
While most environmentalists would agree that bankrupting the coal industry is a good thing, it does not appear to be directly due to popular revulsion; rather, competition from the vast quantities of cheap natural gas that have suddenly become available is the cause. It seems to be purely coincidental that prices of solar-derived electricity have fallen to levels comparable to the price of coal and natural gas-produced electricity. Dramatic decreases in the cost of solar photovoltaic systems have stimulated increases in system installation, but there is a long way to go before solar power will supplant fossil fuel power. Advances in power storage and transmission will also be necessary to make fossil electricity a thing of the past.
Reading the paper this morning was depressing. Politics and politicians, big business, war, insurgency, and terrorism. That is why I prefer to read upbeat news sources like Science News, New Scientist, Scientific American, etc. Immersing oneself in science helps one to take the long view, which is always optimistic because of entropy, which always seems to be running in reverse. In fact, I have a theory that we have the theory of entropy backwards. But enough about me.
Science News has an exciting item about what I believe is called a “metamaterial”– in this case, an alumina screen with of 300 nanometer (average) pores 650 nanometers apart partially filled with gold nanoparticles of a range of sizes, about 90 nanometers thick. The size range is chosen so that the gold absorbs light from 400 angstroms (near-ultraviolet) to 10 micrometers (mid-infrared) with 99% effectiveness. The material is said to be self-assembling by “physical vapor deposition” of gold ions in a very low pressure vapor yielding a random range of gold nanoparticle sizes, which saves greatly on manufacturing costs. It is so light that it floats on water.
This material appears to be very dark, blacker than any printed black. When a body of water covered by a layer of this material is exposed to sunlight, it heats water to the point that it evaporates– without boiling. Its greatest advantage besides its relative cheapness of production is that it can be used with seawater and the evaporated water is essentially pure. The potential uses of this material are tremendous, most especially to desalinate seawater.
The work that went into creating this material did not proceed in a vacuum. Much development preceded it; gold, silver, platinum, and other metals were etched with thin parallel lines to a very fine grid using focused ion beams or electron beam lithography. Many different configurations were tried in an attempt to achieve maximum absorption of light at minimal thickness. None of those materials were as efficient in absorbing light as this one, which has the added advantage of being self-assembling. The work is described as creating “ideal absorbers” and the effect produced by these very tiny holes (400 angstroms wide and 165 angstroms apart) partially filled with gold nanoparticles is called “plasmonics.” The new material changes light into heat to vaporize water with 90% efficiency, much better than the 30% efficiency of current photovoltaic cells. This is not quite as efficient as some of the other materials that have been tried including carbon nanotubes, but it is much cheaper to manufacture.
The steam produced by sunlight can be condensed into fresh water, or it can be used to operate a steam engine, or even to generate electricity. There is no mention of what happens to the salt left behind when saltwater is evaporated by this process. If it stays in the water, then eventually the brine left behind would be too concentrated to boil. If it is left on the surface of the panels, then it could clog up the pores very quickly. Clearly, this is a subject for further evaluation.
The effect that absorption of light produces, localized heating at the pores of the material, is called “localized surface plasmon resonance.” A plasmon is a “quasiparticle” consisting of a quantum of plasma oscillation, an oscillation of the electron density in a conducting medium, described as an instability in the dielectric function of a free electron gas. Yes, I was unprepared for the complexity of this “explanation” but I found it in Wikipedia so it must be true (insert irony here.) Plasmons were first described in 1952 by physicists David Pines (the founding director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter and still living at age 91) and his doctoral advisor David Bohm.
This quote from Wikipedia reveals more hidden depths; Bohm worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII but left the US after he was investigated for his Communist affiliations: “Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this, his epistemology mirrored his ontological viewpoint. Due to his youthful Communist affiliations, Bohm was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen.”
To get back to the subject at hand: The research behind this new material was developed in laboratories at Nanjing University in China and the State University of New York in Buffalo. The original research publication is in the Science Advances section of Science magazine and is apparently free to read, so you don’t have to have a subscription to Science News if you want to wade into the details. This is a very exciting development, and even if I don’t understand plasmons, I can see great potential for saving the world if it can be produced at scale in time to ameliorate global warming.
I think Robert Heinlein (or was it Isaac Asimov?) said “Any sufficiently complex process appears to be magic to the uninitiated.”
An article in Nature describes new information on the shape of the ground underneath the Antarctic ice sheets that suggests that the sheets could melt much more quickly than previously estimated, contributing 64 to 114 centimeters to the rising sea and resulting in 1.5 to 2.1 meters (5-6 feet) total of sea level rise by 2100. This is also because of “previously underappreciated processes linking atmospheric warming with hydrofracturing of buttressing ice shelves and structural collapse of marine-terminating ice cliffs.”
Earlier estimates indicated a rise of one to four feet by 2100, according to the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) National Climate Assessment projections in 2014. Globally, sea levels are already rising faster than expected: according to Wikipedia, 2.6-2.9 mm/year since 1993. Wikipedia says that since 1870, global sea levels have risen 195 millimetres (7.7 in), an average of 1.7 millimetres a year over the entire period. Increasing rates of rise have been seen recently: satellite observations suggest a rise of 3.3 mm a year since 1993.
Uncertainties in drawing ancient coastlines contribute to uncertainty in predicting future sea level rise because tectonic activity has altered the height of the continents over millions of years. These changes have contributed to a potential variation of “35 centimeters or more” in predictions for 2100 according to a Science News article reporting the new Antarctic findings.
Continental uplift caused by groundwater depletion in such areas as California and southern Asia has counteracted some of this sea level rise locally: another research article published online on April 2 describes a rebound of about 25 mm or 0.4 mm a year during the last hundred years. While this will protect the West Coast of the US, it will have little effect on global sea levels.
In the Southern Pacific Ocean, the situation is different. “Changing global trade winds have raised sea levels in the South Pacific about a foot over the past 30 years” (from an article in the NYT last December.) With most of the Marshall Islands less than six feet above sea level now, they are expecting to be overtopped within 50 years by the rising South Pacific. Already, farming on these islands is being wiped out because of salt water infiltrating the ground water table.
This is economically important to the United States due to treaty obligations: the residents of the Marshall Islands have been given legal permission to immigrate to the US because they were displaced by the detonation of 67 nuclear weapons on and over the Bikini Atoll by the US and France. 700,000 people have the right to immigrate to the US because they were moved by the Army as a precaution against fallout before the bombs were set off.
On the top of the world, Greenland’s ice sheet is in trouble too: ” The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.” (from another NYT article, last October, with the ominous title “Greenland is Melting Away.”) A Scientific American article (reprinted from ClimateWire) says that Greenland’s ice cap and glaciers show melting much faster than the rest of Greenland’s ice cover, contributing about ten percent of the whole world’s ice loss. The article says that the ice cap and glaciers are only about 5-7 percent of Greenland’s total ice. It also says that the southeast is melting faster than the northern part of Greenland despite its heavy snowfall. Glaciers in the southeast often feed right into the sea, sending icebergs into shipping lanes (this was the source of the iceberg that sank the Titanic.)
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is one of the most common forms of plastic. It is used to make those little creatures that sit on your desk as well as many other useful items, but until now, it has been impossible to degrade easily. Science magazine on March 11 reported the discovery of a bacterium that is able to break down PET and feed on it; this report was picked up and repeated by Science News. This bacterium was found living in recycling plant sludge, soil, and wastewater during a systematic survey of microbes in Japan. It uses two enzymes to crack PET down into its basic parts, ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid.
These two molecules can be metabolized for energy just as glucose is used by ordinary cells. The two novel enzymes produced by this bacterium are required to break PET down into environmentally benign molecules that can be used as a carbon source and to produce energy. The only barrier to breakdown of PET in the presence of this bacterium is its size– those little statues are solid PET. Prior to metabolism, the PET must be ground down into small particles. A recycling plant could use a grinder to break down large pieces of PET into bite-sized bits that the bacterium could easily eat.
The evolution of organisms that can feed on plastic is a straightforward example of how the process of “survival of the fittest” works. Anything that is available in the environment for consumption and anything that stands in the way of an organism’s survival will be a source of evolutionary drive. Whether it is an antibiotic or just a lump of plastic, something will evolve that can grow on it.
This is good news for the ocean; we have previously described the contamination of the world’s seas by countless bits of microplastic, covering and filling the earth with an invisible pile of plastic trash. The presence of so much plastic is a resource for the world’s micro-organisms that is impossible for them to resist.
I have been reading lately (I know, it’s a bad habit) and I picked up a couple of interesting books. The first is “God’s Battalion’s”. a 148-page, heavily referenced but highly readable book about the Crusades. The book makes the thesis that Christians should not feel guilty about the Crusades because it was part of a thousand-year-old world that just doesn’t exist anymore.
First, the Muslims who were evicted from (and massacred in) Jerusalem in 1099 had first evicted Greek Orthodox “owners” of Jerusalem a couple of hundred years earlier. The First Crusade was initiated in an effort to regain control of Palestine, known as the Holy Land, from the Muslims. The Muslim Arabs had themselves wrested control from the Constantinople-based Romans (after they had split off from the mother Church in Rome) shortly after the prophet Muhammad started a campaign of conquest in the seventh century.
The standards and practices of medieval warfare were violent in the extreme, and both Christian and Muslim warriors fought in ways we nowadays would consider most unchivalrous. European Christians, however, possessed technological and material advantages in warfare that greatly enhanced their fighting ability and made engagements with Muslims rather one-sided. Unless the Muslims were possessed of massive superiority of numbers, they were unable to win battles against the Christians. Their main advantages were the crossbow and heavy chain mail armor, combined with close-marching infantry tactics that Muslims on horseback could not penetrate.
The First Crusade was successful because of these military advantages. Despite their small numbers, European Christian knights were capable of overcoming the best Muslim armies in open warfare. They also had advantages in siege techniques that made it possible to overcome resistance from Muslims defending their cities. The later Crusades failed primarily because of insufficient material support from Europe; equipping field armies to fight two thousand miles from home was very expensive. The Europeans held parts of Palestine for over a hundred years, until the money from home ran out.
In the meantime, the Crusaders built a number of very strong castles that are still standing today. The Crusaders were motivated by religious devotion, in a way that we might find strange. Anyone who went on a Crusade was offered remission of all their sins, and the Crusaders were an extremely sinful lot. Many Crusaders promised to make the trip because they had committed outrages such as murder of a noble equal in status or making off with another’s wife and were promised salvation by their confessors.
In addition to military advantages, the Europeans also had cultural superiority on their side. The Muslims were supposed to have great sophistication in the sciences and art, but this was entirely specious. Their apparent advanced learning was due entirely to the non-Muslim people that were over-run in Muhammad’s conquests; they were allowed to maintain their prior status as long as they paid a tax to the conquerors and voiced their submission.
Arab armies conquered Persia, Byzantium, and western India, and allowed the sophisticated cultures that existed there to continue to operate much as before. Much of the knowledge that these cultures possessed was translated into Arabic, and the great center of learning in Alexandria that had existed since the time of Alexander the Great was allowed to continue to function. Since the Muslim Arabs had no knowledge of boat-building, they were forced to rely on the ports of Syria and Egypt for construction of the fleets that they used to venture into the Mediterranean. They even had to use non-Arab sailors to pilot their ships.
As a result of their lack of sailing experience, the Arabs were unable to conquer Constantinople. A vivid example of their inferiority at sea was the defenders’ use of Greek fire, which only Constantinople knew how to make. This napalm-like substance quickly destroyed several Arab fleets; its precise formula has been sadly lost. Apparently the substance of Greek fire was a liquid which would burst into flame on exposure to air and which floated on water; it could be sprayed through long nozzles onto attacker’s ships, instantly setting them on fire.
It was only long after the Crusades that the Ottoman Turks (non-Arab Muslim converts) were able to capture Constantinople by siege; by then they had superseded the Arabs in the Near East and North Africa and had over-run Spain. The Ottomans ruled Jerusalem until their empire crumbled in the first World War. The British took over control of Palestine at the end of the war and promised the Jews that they could have a homeland there. This promise enraged the Arabs, who were living in Palestine when the Ottomans melted away and who had helped the British to drive out the hated Turks. One of the motives for the British promise to the Jews (known as the Balfour Declaration) was that the British were forced to borrow huge sums from Jewish bankers to underwrite their prosecution of the war against the Germans and the Turks.
The double promise of the British was partly responsible for the conflict in Palestine that came to a head after World War II. Jews, who had no other country in the world where they were really accepted, infiltrated soldiers into Palestine, declared a new sovereign country of Israel, and evicted 800,000 Arabs from the area. Unlike the Arabs, who in 700 AD had massacred a significant portion of the Greek Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem, and the Crusaders in 1099 who massacred the entire population of Jerusalem, they only killed a few thousand resisters. Some would argue that the genocide of six million Jews and the unsympathetic attitude of the rest of the world justified the Jewish occupation of Palestine and forcible removal of the Palestinian Arabs. I would only say that “force majeure” and it is by now a long-accomplished fact.
It was only at the time of the development of Arab nationalism in the late nineteenth century that the concept of the Crusades and crusaders was resurrected to provide an analogy to the colonizing activities of the European powers before and after WW I. Crusading had been forgotten for eight hundred years until the idea was given new life by Arab nationalists. The resettlement of the world’s Jews in Palestine gave especial motivation to the Muslim attitude of jihad and resentment of European interference.
To make a controversial point, the Muslim religion is highly exclusionary and allows for only one interpretation. Sharing Jerusalem with anyone, British or Jewish, was and is not on the agenda for devout Muslims. In fact, to a truly devout Muslim, the entire world rightly belongs to Muslims, particularly Wahhabis. The only correct place for Jews and Christians is as “dhimmis”, or subject populations who voice submission and pay a heavy tax. The only right for Hindus and Buddhists is to die since they are “polytheists”. Sharing the planet is not in the vocabulary of Muslims.
The book makes the point that the Crusades were a response to Arab Muslim aggression and should not be seen in isolation as a “greedy barbarian” invasion of a previously peaceful state. The book also does a good job of puncturing myths of Arab superiority in warfare and cultural sophistication.
In two cases that the New York Times described on April 4, undercover police officers in New York City approached poor addicts and supplied them with money to buy drugs. When the addicts returned with the small quantities (single “hits”) of drugs, they were arrested and charged with felony drug dealing. Both addicts were found not guilty.
This type of behavior is the laziest form of policing possible. Instead of going after dealers with significant quantities of drugs, they entrap poor, naive addicts and use their condition against them. One would think that a better approach would be to use the addicts to turn into informants against the higher level drug dealers– but that would be too difficult and would require actually pursuing people who might fight back– or might be more deserving of jail time than a poor addict.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 