July 2011
Brooklyn.
This weekend Inhabitat rushed to the opening weekend of Brooklyn’s DeKalb Market, a joint venture between specialty market developers Urban Space and designers Youngwoo and Associates. We’ve been anxiously awaiting the opening of the market, which is built from discarded shipping containers…since March. It has brought together local entrepreneurs into not just a market, but an outdoor community center that showcases Brooklyn’s current economy and culture, while hinting at its heritage as a major manufacturing center and commercial port.
Read more: inhabitat, 25.07.11.
Source: CityMaus
Great resource for your bookmarks. Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They’re on the side of bloggers and journalists. I have a law background, and strongly support the legal work of the EFF.
Legal Liability Overview Intellectual Property Online Defamation Law Section 230 Protections Privacy
Heads up Guardian!
The Guardian, one of my favorite papers which I often quote here, has completely re-written an article on the Oslo tragedy originally titled, Oslo Bomb: Suspicion Falls on Islamist Militants, by Peter Beaumont, the foreign affairs editor for their sister paper, The Observer. I quoted an excerpt here on Friday at 9:22am, shortly after it was written. At the time, the responsible party was unknown and news of the shooting was just being broken. Mr. Beaumont offered his “expert” opinion on who could be responsible in an article that pointed all fingers to Islamist groups.
It has been known for some time that al-Qaida and other related “franchises” – including the most active groups in Yemen – have been trying to develop operations. Which leads to a second question: why Norway?
The answer is threefold. In the first instance, with increased levels of security and surveillance in the UK and the US as well as other European capitals, Norway might have been seen as a softer target despite the recent breaking up of an al-Qaida cell in Norway. […]
A second possible factor behind the attack is a Norwegian newspaper’s reprinting in 2006 of a series of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which prompted threats against the country. A third potential explanation is the decision last week by a Norwegian prosecutor to file terror charges against an Iraqi-born cleric for threatening to kill Norwegian politicians if he is deported.
Not only has that excerpt been wiped in its entirety and the title replaced with, Norway Attacks Suggest Political Motive, the central theme of the article, which prematurely blamed Islamist extremists has been re-written as:
The re-appearance of an apparently large scale and co-ordinated terrorist attack in a European capital raises the inevitable questions of who was behind it. The most tempting and immediate conclusion was that it would be a jihadist group, as the style of the Oslo attack bore strong similarities to other earlier attacks in Europe and elsewhere. […]
Nowhere is the phrase, “As I reported/speculated earlier”.
It’s especially interesting in the light of a new article by Charlie Brooker, The News Coverage of the Norway Mass-Killings was Fact-Free Conjecture:
Let’s be absolutely clear, it wasn’t experts speculating, it was guessers guessing – and they were terrible. […]
In the aftermath of the initial bombing, they proceeded to wrestle with the one key question: why do Muslims hate Norway?
Luckily, the experts were on hand to expertly share their expert solutions to plug this apparent plot hole in the ongoing news narrative. Why do Muslims hate Norway? There had to be a reason. Norway was targeted because of its role in Afghanistan. Norway was targeted because Norwegian authorities had recently charged an extremist Muslim cleric. Norway was targeted because one of its newspapers had reprinted the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Norway was targeted because, compared to the US and UK, it is a “soft target” – in other words, they targeted it because no one expected them to.
I expect this behavior from lower papers, not from you. What gives, Guardian?
Tired of pesky flies in his soup, soupsoup takes a break. Say it ain’t so!
Tumblr has become terribly unstable. My theme just changed format for no reason whatsoever, my posts are showing up multiple times, posts are getting lost after I send them.
I can’t deal with trying to hack together fixes for this. I can’t spend time putting together posts only for them to be…
Would love to. Send me the bill and links/sources to commentary. m
The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. By the turn of the 20th century, the number of criminal statutes numbered in the dozens.
Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, according to a 2008 study by retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker. There are also thousands of regulations that carry criminal penalties. Some laws are so complex, scholars debate whether they represent one offense, or scores of offenses.
Click the below to access the interactive data.
Counting (all the crimes) is impossible. The Justice Department spent two years trying in the 1980s, but produced only an estimate: 3,000 federal criminal offenses.
What’s really interesting about these laws is that, unlike the states, the Federal Government doesn’t have to show criminal intent. If you’re digging up arrowheads with your son as a hobby, for example, you could go to jail for up to 2 years for violating the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. The government doesn’t have to show that you had the intent to steal the arrowheads, you’re just guilty period (oppose that to, say, robbing a bank where your intent, while obvious, still has to be shown in local courts).
Fields notes, that the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 “doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.”
What do you think?
The answer will surprise you. (Note I’ve enabled answers, please leave your comments. I’d like to hear from you on this one.) Yale E360 asked 8 renowned climate scientists if the current weather extremes can be traced to anthropogenic climate change. The majority (7-1) gave the qualified answer of “no, but…”.
While they agreed that extremes are occurring, they pointed out that variability is part of the natural processes of climate. There will be mega heat waves, mega snow storms, and mega typhoons irrespective of how much carbon is pumped into the atmosphere. Thus, the fact that climate is already quite unpredictable needs to carry more weight in models that include GHGs.
Most surprising, at least to me, is that the scientists recognized that human population is skewing the data in ways that make “climate change” a policy emergency. More people are moving to areas that are vulnerable to disasters. We’re moving to the coasts, building bigger homes and infrastructure, and generally concentrating in areas that are vulnerable to disasters.
Scientists in both camps said two physical phenomena — warmer air holds more moisture, and higher temperatures exacerbate naturally occurring heat waves — would almost by definition mean more extremes. But some argued that the growing human toll from hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and heat waves is primarily related to burgeoning human population and the related degradation of the environment.
The substantial interest in attributing extreme weather events to global warming seems rooted in the perceived need for some sort of a disaster to drive public opinion and the political process in the direction of taking action on climate change. However, attempts to attribute individual extreme weather events, or collections of extreme weather events, may be fundamentally ill-posed in the context of the complex climate system, which is characterized by spatiotemporal chaos. There are substantial difficulties and problems associated with attributing changes in the average climate to natural variability versus anthropogenic forcing, which I have argued are oversimplified by the IPCC assessments. Attribution of extreme weather events is further complicated by their dependence on weather regimes and internal multi-decadal oscillations that are simulated poorly by climate models.
I have been completely unconvinced by any of the arguments that I have seen that attributes a single extreme weather event, a cluster of extreme weather events, or statistics of extreme weather events to anthropogenic forcing.
More field data over longer periods of time are needed in order to make statistically significant correlations between isolated weather events, and anthropogenic change. The answers they give are quite instructive. And I would ask climate advocates to give it a read and consider their opinion about changing policy is soundly informed. What do you think?
Source: Yale E360
