Solar On Water

I think this could work well on small ponds.

Solar Panels Floating on Water Will Power Japan's Homes

More solar power plants are being built on water, but is this such a good idea?

 

By Bryan Lufkin, for National Geographic

PUBLISHED January 16, 2015
 

Nowadays, bodies of water aren't necessarily something to build around—they're something to build on. They sport not just landfills and man-made beaches but also, in a nascent global trend, massive solar power plants.

Clean energy companies are turning to lakes, wetlands, ponds, and canals as building grounds for sunlight-slurping photovoltaic panels. So far, floating solar structures have been announced in, among other countries, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and Italy.

The biggest floating plant, in terms of output, will soon be placed atop the reservoir of Japan's Yamakura Dam in Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo. When completed in March 2016, it will cover 180,000 square meters, hold 50,000 photovoltaic solar panels, and power nearly 5,000 households. It will also offset nearly 8,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. (Since the EPA estimates a typical car releases 4.7 tons of CO2 annually, that's about 1,700 cars' worth of emissions.)

The Yamakura Dam project is a collaboration by Kyocera (a Kyoto-headquartered electronics manufacturer), Ciel et Terre (a French company that designs, finances, and operates photovoltaic installations), and Century Tokyo Leasing Corporation.

So, why build solar panels on water instead of just building them on land? Placing the panels on a lake or reservoir frees up surrounding land for agricultural use, conservation, or other development. With these benefits, though, come challenges. (See related story: "How Green Are Those Solar Panels, Really?")

Solar Enters New Territory

"Overall, this is a very interesting idea. If successful, it will bring a huge impact," says Yang Yang, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles who specializes in photovoltaic solar panels. "However, I do have concerns of its safety against storms and other natural disasters, not to mention corrosion."

Unlike a solar installation on the ground or mounted on a rooftop, floating solar energy plants present relatively new difficulties. For one thing, everything needs to be waterproofed, including the panels and wiring. Plus, a giant, artificial contraption can't just be dropped into a local water supply without certain precautions, such as adherence to regulations on water quality—a relevant concern, particularly if the structure starts to weather away.

"That is one reason we chose Ciel et Terre's floating platforms, which are 100 percent recyclable and made of high-density polyethylene that can withstand ultraviolet rays and corrosion," says Ichiro Ikeda, general manager of Kyocera's solar energy marketing division.

Another obstacle? Japan's omnipresent threat of natural disasters. In addition to typhoons, the country is a global hot spot for earthquakes, landslides, and tidal waves.

To make sure the platforms could withstand the whims of Mother Nature, Ciel et Terre's research and development team brought in the big guns: a wind tunnel at Onera, the French aerospace lab. The company's patented Hydrelio system—those polyethylene "frames" that cradle the solar panels—was subjected to very high wind conditions that matched hurricane speeds. The system resisted winds of up to 118 miles per hour.

Why Japan Could Be the Perfect Spot

Given its weather, why build floating solar panels in the storm-filled, Ring of Fire-hugging Land of the Rising Sun? The reason: Many nations could benefit from floating solar power. And Japan is their poster child.

The largely mountainous archipelago of Japan suffers from a lack of usable land, meaning there's less room for anything to be built, let alone a large-scale solar plant. However, the nation is rich in reservoirs, since it has a sprawling rice industry to irrigate, so more solar energy companies in Japan are favoring liquid over land for construction sites. Suddenly, inaccessible terrain becomes accessible.

Kyocera's Ikeda says available land in Japan is especially hard to come by these days, as the number of ground-based solar plants in the country has skyrocketed in the past few years. (See related story: "Japan Solar Energy Soars, But Grid Needs to Catch Up.")

But, he added, "the country has many reservoirs for agricultural and flood-control purposes. There is great potential in carrying out solar power generation on these water surfaces."

In Japan's case, Ciel et Terre says that the region's frequent seismic fits aren't cause for concern, either. In fact, they illustrate another benefit that floating solar panels have over their terrestrial counterparts, the company says.

"Earthquakes have no impacts on the floating photovoltaic system, which has no foundation and an adequate anchoring system that ensures its stability," says Eva Pauly, international business manager at Ciel et Terre. "That's a big advantage in a country like Japan."

Solar's Potential Ecological Impact

Floating solar panel manufacturers hope their creations replace more controversial energy sources.

"Japan needs new, independent, renewable energy sources after the Fukushima disaster," says Pauly. "The country needs more independent sources of electricity after shutting down the nuclear power and relying heavily on imported liquid gas."

This up-and-coming aquatic alternative impacts organisms living in the water, though. The structure stymies sunlight penetration, slowly making the water cooler and darker. This can halt algae growth, for example, which Ciel et Terre project manager Lise Mesnager says "could be either positive or negative." If there's too much algae in the water, the shadow-casting floating panels might be beneficial; if the water harbors endangered species, they could harm them.

"It is really important for the operator to have a good idea of what kind of species can be found in the water body," Mesnager says.

Since companies must follow local environmental rules, these solar plants are usually in the center of the water, away from banks rich with flora and fauna. Plus, companies might prefer building in man-made reservoirs instead of natural ones, as the chances of harming the area's biodiversity are smaller.

Could the Future Include Salt Water?

More than three-quarters of our planet is ocean, which might present alternative energy companies a blank canvas on which to dot more buoyant energy farms. But moving floating panels to the open sea is still in the future. Kyocera's Ikeda says it would bring up a whole new realm of issues, from waves to changing water levels, which could lead to damage and disrupted operations.

Ciel et Terre is experimenting with salt water-friendly systems in Thailand, but ocean-based plants might be impractical, as offshore installations are costly, and it's more logical to produce electricity closer to where it'll be used.

For now, companies are aiming to build floating energy sources that conserve limited space, are cheaper than solar panels on terra firma, and are, above all, efficient. Ciel et Terre says that since its frames keep Kyocera's solar panels cool, the floating plant could generate up to 20 percent more energy than a typical ground system does.

The Yamakura Dam project might be the world's biggest floating solar plant, but it wasn't the first-and it almost certainly won't be the last.

The story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2015/01/150116-floating-solar-power-japan-yamakura/#

 

War On Drugs Backfires

One of the best articles I have read on the War On Drugs -

How the war on drugs creates violence

By Danielle Allen October 16

Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

To argue for legalization of marijuana and decriminalization of other drugs does not, at first blush, appear to put one on the side of the angels, especially given the accelerating heroin epidemic. But legalization and decriminalization are what we need if we want to make headway against mass incarceration, high homicide rates in urban black communities and poor educational outcomes in urban schools. If we view drug use as a public health problem, not a crime, we can fight drugs without producing the other sorts of social damage we see all around us.

Americans from all racial groups pursue narcotic-related leisure activities, spending an estimated $100 billion a year on their illegal drugs, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In this current period of fairly active military engagement, the nation’s defense budget is roughly $600 billion. In other words, our culture of illegal drug use must be pretty important to amount to a full sixth of our budget for national defense.

Yet despite this evidence of far-reaching social acceptance of illegal drug use, we continue to lock up nonviolent offenders. Ceasing this hypocritical practice by releasing nonviolent offenders is morally urgent. Yet this would be only a small step toward rectification of the problem of mass incarceration. As the Web site FiveThirtyEight recently reported, such a move would reduce our state and federal prison populations by only about 14 percent. We would still be the world’s leading imprisoner.

The further-reaching reason to legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs flows from how the war on drugs drives violent crime, which in turn pushes up incarceration and generates other negative social outcomes. You just can’t move $100 billion worth of illegal product without a lot of assault and homicide. This should not be a hard point to see or make. Criminologists and law enforcement personnel alike acknowledge that the most common examples of “criminogenic trends” that generate increases in murder and other violent crimes are gang- and drug-related homicides.

But there is also another, more subtle connection between the drug war and violence, pinpointed by economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi . As they argue, above-average homicide rates will result from low rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption. Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Such places operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong offense.

Major urban centers of the drug trade are just such environments, plagued by low clearance rates for homicide. In Detroit, in the years approaching the city’s bankruptcy, the homicide clearance rate verged on single digits. In Chicago, in 2009, police cleared only 30 percent of homicide cases, many of them without charges. In one Los Angeles Police Department bureau, clearance rates in the 60s mask the low rate of cases ending in arrest and prosecution. And clearance rates are lowest when victims are black and brown, as Jill Leovy explains in her new book, “Ghettoside.” In contrast, in the 1960s, in the United States, the average clearance rate for homicide was above 90 percent, according to NPR.

Why have homicide clearance rates fallen so low in these cities? According to criminologist Charles Wellford, drug-related homicides are harder to investigate, possibly because they are more likely to be stranger-to-stranger incidents and possibly because the drug business generates witness-suppression systems. Additionally, stop-and-frisk tactics have eroded trust in police and further diminished the willingness of witnesses to testify. And, recently, justified anger over police violence has further reduced the capacity of the police to function well in investigating homicides.

Finally, an overloaded judicial system may well put prosecutors in a position where they wish to pursue only open-and-shut cases that will generate plea deals. According to a retired police officer interviewed by NPR, Vernon Geberth , police nowadays have a higher bar to get over in trying to clear a case because prosecutors want only those easier cases.

And what is the No. 1 source of this prosecutorial overload? According to federal judicial caseload statistics, in U.S. district courts in 2013, 32 percent of defendant filings were for drug-related cases, making this the biggest category of filings. State judicial systems, too, have been significantly strained for financial resources and personnel by drug-related casework. Add to this picture the fact that plenty of violent offenders in our nation’s prisons started out as nonviolent drug offenders, and you have a complete picture of just how much the drug war itself has been a generator of violence.

The drug war is a perfect example of the breakdown of the rule of law and the knock-on effects of such a breakdown. Our drug laws are fundamentally unenforceable, and this distorts the judicial system, including by producing prosecutorial overload, which is a driver of low homicide clearance rates, which beget a culture of increasing violence, which puts more fathers of young children behind bars or under the ground, makes it harder for children in poor, urban areas to walk to school safely, and forces on those children a choice between the culture of the schools, inside the rule of law, and the culture of the streets, outside the rule of law. Since Plato, we have known that the power of schools to develop the minds of the young depends on an alignment of the worlds inside and outside the school. The culture of violence in urban areas, begotten by the war on drugs and a reflection of the failure of the rule of law, is the opposite of a healthy context for learning.

Why is it so hard for us to see how profoundly a $100 billion illegal market in anything, even in popcorn or “My Little Pony” toys, would distort a society? Can there be any other reason for our failure to see this than that black and brown people bear the brunt of these distortions? If we care for the safety and happiness of the whole of our society, as we must, then it is time to legalize marijuana, decriminalize other drugs and recast drug use as a public health problem, not a crime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-war-on-drugs-creates-violence/2015/10/16/6de57a76-72b7-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html

Legal Ganga In Jamaica - Soon come, sort of

  Cracks in the machine. Not complaining but two ounces is not enough.

Jamaica poised to relax cannabis laws 

Several restrictions on ‘ganja’ use could go up in smoke as island’s politicians back bill to establish licensing authority

The Jamaican cabinet has approved a bill that would decriminalise possession of small amounts of cannabis and pave the way for a legal medical marijuana industry, the justice minister has said.
Mark Golding said he expected to introduce the legislation in the Senate this week. Debate could start this month in the country where the drug, known popularly as “ganja”, has long been culturally entrenched but illegal.
The bill would establish a cannabis licensing authority to deal with the regulations needed to cultivate, sell and distribute the herb for medical, scientific and therapeutic purposes. “We need to position ourselves to take advantage of the significant economic opportunities offered by this emerging industry,” he said.
It would make possession of 2 ounces (56g) or less an offence that would not result in a criminal record. Cultivation of five or fewer plants on any premises would be permitted. Rastafarians, who use marijuana as a sacrament, could also legally use it for religious purposes for the first time in Jamaica, where the spiritual movement was founded in the 1930s.
For decades, debate has raged on the Caribbean island over laws governing marijuana use. But now, with several countries and US states relaxing their laws on the herb, Jamaica is advancing reform plans.
Golding said the government would not soften its stance on drug trafficking and it intended to use a proportion of revenues from its licensing authority to support a public education campaign to discourage pot-smoking by young people and mitigate public health consequences.
The director of the national Cannabis Commercial and Medicinal Research Taskforce said he expected the bill to be passed soon in parliament, where Portia Simpson Miller’s governing party holds a 2-1 majority. “This development is long overdue,” Delano Seiveright said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/22/jamaica-considers-cannabis-legalisation



A cannabis farmer in Nine Mile, Jamaica. Photograph: David Mcfadden/AP

Science Wakes Up To Positive Aspects Of Psychedelic Mushrooms

      Give science time - you never know when science will recognize the positive aspects of something that has been in use by people for centuries, even millennia.

From The Washington Post -

Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds

By Rachel Feltman July 3, 2014

Psychedelic mushrooms can do more than make you see the world in kaleidoscope. Research suggests they may have permanent, positive effects on the human brain.
In fact, a mind-altering compound found in some 200 species of mushroom is already being explored as a potential treatment for depression and anxiety. People who consume these mushrooms, after "trips" that can be a bit scary and unpleasant, report feeling more optimistic, less self-centered, and even happier for months after the fact.
But why do these trips change the way people see the world? According to a study published today in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom compounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective.
The study examined brain activity in those who’d received injections of psilocybin, which gives "shrooms" their psychedelic punch. Despite a long history of mushroom use in spiritual practice, scientists have only recently begun to  examine the brain activity of those using the compound, and this is the first study to attempt to relate the behavioral effects to biological changes.
After injections, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain function in areas associated with emotion and memory. The effect was strikingly similar to a brain in dream sleep, according to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and co-author of the study.
“You’re seeing these areas getting louder, and more active,” he said. “It’s like someone’s turned up the volume there, in these regions that are considered part of an emotional system in the brain. When you look at a brain during dream sleep, you see the same hyperactive emotion centers.”
In fact, administration of the drug just before or during sleep seemed to promote higher activity levels during Rapid Eye Movement sleep, when dreams occur. An intriguing finding, Carhart-Harris says, given that people tend to describe their experience on psychedelic drugs as being like “a waking dream.” It seems that the brain may literally be slipping into unconscious patterns while the user is awake.
Conversely, the subjects of the study had decreased activity in other parts of the brain—areas associated with high level cognition. “These are the most recent parts of our brain, in an evolutionary sense,” Carhart-Harris said. “And we see them getting quieter and less organized.”
This dampening of one area and amplification of another could explain the “mind-broadening” sensation of psychedelic drugs, he said. Unlike most recreational drugs, psychotropic mushrooms and LSD don’t provide a pleasant, hedonistic reward when they’re consumed. Instead, users take them very occasionally, chasing the strange neurological effects instead of any sort of high.
“Except for some naïve users who go looking for a good time…which, by the way, is not how it plays out,” Carhart-Harris said, “you see people taking them to experience some kind of mental exploration, and to try to understand themselves.”
Our firm sense of self—the habits and experiences that we find integral to our personality—is quieted by these trips. Carhart-Harris believes that the drugs may unlock emotion while “basically killing the ego,” allowing users to be less narrow-minded and let go of negative outlooks.
It’s still not clear why such effects can have more profound long-term effects on the brain than our nightly dreams. But Carhart-Harris hopes to see more of these compounds in modern medicine. “The way we treat psychological illnesses now is to dampen things,” he said. “We dampen anxiety, dampen ones emotional range in the hope of curing depression, taking the sting out of what one feels.”
But some patients seem to benefit from having their emotions “unlocked” instead. “It would really suit the style of psychotherapy where we engage in a patient’s history and hang-ups,” Carhart-Harris said. “Instead of putting a bandage over the exposed wound, we’d be essentially loosening their minds—promoting a permanent change in outlook.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/07/03/psychedelic-drugs-put-your-brain-in-a-waking-dream-study-finds/?hpid=z6

From Yahoo.com - 

How Tripping On Mushrooms Changes The Brain

.By Erin Brodwin     October 29, 2014 4:45 PM


Lightworkerpeace/Wikimedia Commons Psilocybe Pelliculosa mushrooms, one of the more than 200 psilocybin-containing species.

Tripping on magic mushrooms may actually free the mind, a new study says. The compounds in the (illegal) mushrooms change the way the brain works.

New research suggests that psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, sprouts new links across previously disconnected brain regions, temporarily altering the brain's entire organizational framework.

These new connections are likely what allow users to experience things like seeing sounds or hearing colors. And they could also be responsible for giving magic mushrooms some of their antidepressant qualities.

When researchers compared the brains of people who had received IV injections of psilocybin with those of people given a placebo, they found that the drug changed how information was carried across the brain. (Subjects received 2 milligrams of psilocybin; the dose and concentration of the chemical in actual mushrooms — which are eaten, not injected — varies.) Typically, brain activity follows specific neural networks. But in the people given psilocybin injections, cross-brain activity seemed more erratic, as if freed from its normal framework.

When the researchers looked more closely, however, they noticed that the sparks of activity across the brains of their drugged volunteers wasn't as chaotic as it seemed.

Instead, the activity formed distinct patterns, or cycles.
"The brain does not simply become a random system after psilocybin injection," the researchers wrote, "but instead retains some organizational features, albeit different from the normal state."

Picture the information in your brain being shared across an interconnected and heavily-trafficked system of highways. In that example, psilocybin isn't removing the highways. Instead, it's simply building new ones.

These new connections allow parts of the brain that don't usually talk to one another to communicate. People who use magic mushrooms and see the number 52 as glowing bright blue and red, then, don't see it that way because the drugs have made them crazy. Instead, they associate the number with colors because the brain region that detects and interprets color has been chatting it up with the brain region that processes numbers.

This new insight into what psilocybin does to the brain could help explain years of earlier findings on psilocybin's psychological effects, including how magic mushrooms seem to curb symptoms of depression.

In a 2012 study, Imperial College London neuroscientist David Nutt found that in people drugged with psilocybin, brain chatter across traditional areas of the brain was muted, including in a region thought to play a role in maintaining our sense of self. In depressed people, Nutt believes, the connections between brain circuits in this sense-of-self region are too strong. "People who get into depressive thinking, their brains are overconnected," Nutt told Psychology Today. Negative thoughts and feelings of self-criticism become obsessive and overwhelming.

Loosening those connections and creating new ones, Nutt thinks, could provide intense relief.

Johns Hopkins psychologists came to similar findings when they induced out of body experiences in a small group of volunteers dosed with psilocybin. Immediately following their sessions, participants said they felt more open, more imaginative, and more appreciative of beauty. When the researchers followed up with the volunteers a year later, nearly two-thirds said the experience had been one of the most important in their lives; close to half continued to score higher on a personality test of openness than they had before taking the drug.

Nick Fernandez, a former cancer patient and psychology graduate student who took psilocybin as part of a New York University study, experienced those same feelings of freedom and positivity.

"For the first time in my life, I felt like there was... a force greater than myself," Fernandez told Aeon Magazine. "Something inside me snapped and I experienced a... shift that made me realize all my anxieties, defenses, and insecurities weren't something to worry about."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tripping-mushrooms-changes-brain-204500998.html

Asset Forfeiture Is A Police Scam

   When the people who ran the program tell you the program is defective......... maybe believe them! The Washington Post ran a series on how asset seizing is abused by police. This is an editorial after the series ran by two men who helped run the Federal asset seizure program. The idea that they call this "forfeiture" is ludicrous - it is seizure not any forfeiture. What kind of forfeiture is it when a gun is held to your head?
   To add insult to injury, police departments actually budget in advance based on expected seizures. In other words, if they don't keep pace on seizures, some police programs and/or purchases would have to be cut. Sounds like pretty good motivation to seize whatever you can.

Government self-interest corrupted a crime-fighting tool into an evil

By John Yoder and Brad Cates September 18, 2014

John Yoder was director of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office from 1983 to 1985. Brad Cates was the director of the office from 1985 to 1989.

Last week, The Post published a series of in-depth articles about the abuses spawned by the law enforcement practice known as civil asset forfeiture. As two people who were heavily involved in the creation of the asset forfeiture initiative at the Justice Department in the 1980s, we find it particularly painful to watch as the heavy hand of government goes amok. The program began with good intentions but now, having failed in both purpose and execution, it should be abolished.

Asset forfeiture was conceived as a way to cut into the profit motive that fueled rampant drug trafficking by cartels and other criminal enterprises, in order to fight the social evils of drug dealing and abuse. Over time, however, the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.

The idea seemed so simple: Seize the ill-gotten gains of big-time drug dealers and remove the financial incentive for their criminality. After all, if a kingpin could earn $20 million and stash it away somewhere, even a decade in prison would have its rewards. Make that money disappear, and the calculus changes.

Then, in 1986, the concept was expanded to include not only cash earned illegally but also purchases or investments made with that money, creating a whole scheme of new crimes that could be prosecuted as “money laundering.” The property eligible for seizure was further expanded to include “instrumentalities” in the trafficking of drugs, such as cars or even jewelry. Eventually, more than 200 crimes beyond drugs came to be included in the forfeiture scheme.

This all may have been fine in theory, but in the real world it went badly astray. First, many states adopted their own forfeiture laws, creating programs with less monitoring than those at the federal level. Second, state law enforcement agencies and prosecutors started using the property — and finally even to provide basic funding for their departments. 

Even at the outset, the use of seized property was an issue. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, for example, might see a suspected dealer in a car they wanted for undercover work and seize it. But if the car had an outstanding loan, the DEA could not keep it without paying the lien. This led to distorted enforcement decisions, with agents choosing whom to pursue based on irrelevant factors such as whether the target owed money on his car.

As time went on and states got into the forfeiture game, the uses became more personally rewarding for law enforcement. Maintaining an undercover identity was often no longer even part of the justification for seizures.

Law enforcement agents and prosecutors began using seized cash and property to fund their operations, supplanting general tax revenue, and this led to the most extreme abuses: law enforcement efforts based upon what cash and property they could seize to fund themselves, rather than on an even-handed effort to enforce the law.

Many Americans are familiar with old-time speed traps, which became so notorious that most state legislatures reformed their systems to require local police and courts to deposit traffic fines into the state treasury to avoid the appearance of biased justice. Today, the old speed traps have all too often been replaced by forfeiture traps, where local police stop cars and seize cash and property to pay for local law enforcement efforts. This is a complete corruption of the process, and it unsurprisingly has led to widespread abuses.

The Asset Forfeiture Reform Act was enacted in 2000 to rein in abuses, but virtually nothing has changed. This is because civil forfeiture is fundamentally at odds with our judicial system and notions of fairness. It is unreformable.

In America, it is often said that it is better that nine guilty people go free than one innocent person be wrongly convicted. But our forfeiture laws turn our traditional concept of guilt upside down. Civil forfeiture laws presume someone’s personal property to be tainted, placing the burden of proving it “innocent” on the owner. What of the Fourth Amendment requirement that a warrant to seize or search requires the showing of probable cause of a specific violation? 

Defendants should be charged with the crimes they commit. Charge someone with drug dealing if it can be proved, but don’t invent a second offense of “money laundering” to use as a backup or a pretext to seize cash. Valid, time-tested methods exist to allow law enforcement to seize contraband, profits and instrumentalities via legitimate criminal prosecution.

Civil asset forfeiture and money-laundering laws are gross perversions of the status of government amid a free citizenry. The individual is the font of sovereignty in our constitutional republic, and it is unacceptable that a citizen should have to “prove” anything to the government. If the government has probable cause of a violation of law, then let a warrant be issued. And if the government has proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt, let that guilt be proclaimed by 12 peers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/abolish-the-civil-asset-forfeiture-program-we-helped-create/2014/09/18/72f089ac-3d02-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html?hpid=z7

Lebanese Politician Calls For Legal Marijuana

      Of note is the report that Walid Jumblatt, a veteran Lebanese politician is now calling for legal marijuana.

Lebanese Marijuana Farmers Record Bumper Crop, As Syrian Civil War Occupies Authorities

A marijuana farmer in Lebanon's Bekaa valley.

Getty Images

Marijuana farmers in Lebanon claim that with authorities distracted by the fallout from the civil war in neighboring Syria, they have been able to reap bumper harvests of the drug.

Previously, the Lebanese army would burn fields of the drug grown to be exported and sold on the streets of Europe, but with the unrest in Syria causing thousands to flee into Lebanon leaving the army's hands full, farmers have been free to cultivate the crop.

"This year we had a good year," Ali Nasri Shamas, a local marijuana kingpin told the Telegraph.

He said that farmers had stockpiled weapons, and would defend their crop from authorities.

"We are selling hashish, and if anyone from the government tries to come close to it, we'll kill them."

Swaths of agricultural land in the country which were once used to cultivate beet crops have been turned over to marijuana production, with Shamas buying the produce of small-scale farmers, as well as employing his own growers, and processing the crop in a secret plant in the Bekaa valley.

Shamas said that after being made into hashish, it is exported to nearby countries, including Egypt and Syria, with the war having loosened Syrian border controls. But some is sold to European suppliers, including retailers in Amsterdam, where the drug is legal, and the U.K.

He said that there was now such an abundant supply of the drug that prices had fallen, and that farmers would pocket $1,200 two years ago, but now taking only a quarter of that: $350.

However, he said that his main farmers still stood to make around half a million dollars a year.

Lebanon became a hub for the production of drugs during its 1975-1990 civil war, and Shamas said that subsequent political corruption and failed attempts to replace marijuana with other crops had left the region impoverished.

This week, Walid Jumblatt, a prominent politician from the country's Druze minority, called for the cultivation of the drug to be legalized.

"It's time to allow hash to be grown and to overturn arrest warrants against people sought for doing so," the veteran politician wrote in Arabic on his Twitter account, reports AFP.  

http://www.ibtimes.com/lebanese-marijuana-farmers-record-bumper-crop-syrian-civil-war-occupies-authorities-1764156

Accountability: Does It Apply To The Police?

      Police often think what is good for them is not for everyone else. Ever take pictures of the police? They don't like it is my general impression based on police response when I have taken pictures of police doing or not doing their job.

Store owner installs surveillance cameras to spy on police

A Miami convenience store owner is fed up with his employees and customers being allegedly harassed by police. So he installs surveillance video to get evidence against the local cops.

by Chris Matyszczyk

• November 22, 2014 8:18 PM PST

Surveillance is for our own good.
By having everything that we are doing monitored, we can be sure that we (who have nothing to hide) will be safe.
At least, that's the logic many authorities offer us, as they spy, pry, and vilify anyone who might feel suspicious.
What happens, though, when you suspect the authorities of behaving suspiciously? Is it all right to spy on them?
Miami Gardens, Fla., convenience store owner Alex Saleh decided he'd try. He'd become vexed at what he saw as police harassment of his employees and even his customers.
So he installed surveillance cameras, with the specific intention of watching the detectives.
He'd become frustrated, you see, about the possibly not coincidental number of times that his employee, Earl Sampson, had been stopped and questioned by police officers -- 258 times over a four-year period does seem a little like overkill. These included 100 searches and 56 jailings. As for convictions, well, they were only for marijuana possession.
Saleh told the Miami Herald it seemed odd that Sampson had been arrested 62 times for trespassing, when the vast majority of offenses were outside the very same Quickstop.
That would be the Quickstop where Sampson worked.
In all, Saleh installed 15 surveillance cameras. Some might find a certain poetry in the fact that he felt the need for them, when he says his store has never been robbed.
The videos make for numbing viewing. In one, a store employee takes out the trash, only to be arrested for trespassing. Others appear to show searches without warrants and police stopping customers without any obvious reason.
Miami Gardens is neither an easy, nor a safe place. But the police's reluctance to so far comment on these videos and the Herald's reporting suggest that some questions might need to be answered.
Clearly, there is a history between Saleh and the police. He filed an internal affairs report against some officers. He claims they retaliated by being more aggressive.

But he's owned the store for 17 years. The fact that he has to install cameras in an attempt to prove what he feels is racial profiling, excessive aggression, and intimidation might be a portent of what is to come, as technology becomes ever more involved in everyday life.
If police officers are to be outfitted with cameras , will citizens feel the need to have Google Glass or its equivalent, just to ensure they have their own filmic version of an encounter with authorities?
Some police officers have aggressively shown how uncomfortable they are with ordinary citizens filming them in the line of duty.
In one case this year, police in Bakersfield, Calif., were accused of erasing cell phone video of an incident in which a man died.
In another incident in San Diego, an officer being filmed making an arrest declared that the Samsung Galaxy in question was a weapon .
Even if we're all filming each other, there will still be questions surrounding editing and other forms of manipulation.
In the search for justice, there's always that nagging question: Whose?

http://www.cnet.com/news/store-owner-installs-surveillance-cameras-to-spy-on-police/#ftag=YHF65cbda0

Wendell Berry - Dose of Reality

   I have been reading Wendell Berry since the late 1970's. More people need to listen to him. A poet and a farmer - or a farmer and a poet.
   From The Guardian - 

Wendell Berry: 'for Americans to talk about sustainability is a bit of a joke'

Influence of local food effort is tiny but industrial agriculture is blasting ahead at a great rate, says author, farmer and activist

Roger Cohn for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
Thursday 6 March 2014



Author Wendell Berry at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. Photograph: Ed Reinke/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Wendell Berry wrote about and practiced “sustainable agriculture” long before the term was widely used. His 1977 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, in which he argued against industrial agriculture and for small-scale, local-based farming, had a strong influence on the environmental and local food movements in the US.

Berry has long balanced the diverse roles of writer, activist, teacher, and farmer. At age 79, he still lives on the farm near Port Royal, Kentucky, where he grew up, and uses traditional methods to work the land there. And he still speaks eloquently about the importance of local communities and of caring for the land, while warning of the destructive potential of industrialization and technology.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 editor Roger Cohn, Berry talked about his Kentucky farm and why he has remained there, why he would risk arrest to protest mountaintop removal mining, why the sustainable agriculture movement faces an uphill battle, and why strong rural communities are important. “A deep familiarity between a local community and a local landscape is a dear thing, just in human terms,” Berry said. “It’s also, down the line, money in the bank, because it helps you to preserve the working capital of the place.”

Yale Environment 360: You’ve been writing about and practicing what is now known as sustainable agriculture since before that term was widely used. In recent years, there’s been a movement among some people toward sustainable agriculture. Do you feel sustainable agriculture is gaining ground in a significant way that could slow the growth of industrial agriculture, or is it more of a boutique type of thing?
Wendell Berry: Well, we are a young country. By the time settlement reached Kentucky it was 1775, and the industrial revolution was already underway. So we’ve been 238 years in Kentucky, we Old World people. And what we have done there in that time has not been sustainable. In fact, it has been the opposite. There’s less now of everything in the way of natural gifts, less of everything than what was there when we came. Sometimes we have radically reduced the original gift. And so for Americans to talk about sustainability is a bit of a joke, because we haven’t sustained anything very long — and a lot of things we haven’t sustained at all.

The acreage that is now under the influence of the local food effort or the sustainable agriculture effort is at present tiny, and industrial agriculture is blasting ahead at a great rate. For instance, in the last two years, the high price of corn and soybeans has driven that kind of agriculture into the highly vulnerable uplands of my home country. I can show you farms that in my lifetime have been mostly in grass that are now suddenly covered, line fence to line fence, with monocultures of corn or beans….

So we have these two things, a promising start on what we call, loosely, sustainable land use, and we have a still far larger industrial extractive agriculture operating, really, against the land.

e360: On your place where you live now and farm, what are some of the practices that you employ and use to take good care of the land and make it sustainable?

Berry: The farm that my wife and I have is in every way marginal. Every foot of it is either steep, which is most of it, or it floods [Laughs]. So it’s land that you can learn a lot from in a hurry because it is so demanding of care. The way to deal with that land is to keep it covered with permanent pasture or woodland. We have some slopes in pasture that ought to have remained woodland, but we’ve kept most of it going the way it came to us.

e360: And do you do forest logging there as well?

Berry: Most of our woodland we don’t use, but some we use for firewood, an occasional saw log, fence posts, that sort of thing. The emerald ash borer [a destructive beetle] is now among us, and we are cutting the large trees that the emerald ash borer has killed. The ash wood is valuable as sawed lumber, and it’s also wonderful firewood… My son does woodworking, and so it’s worthwhile to him to have supplies of sawed boards laid up.

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e360: You write a lot about local agriculture and the local economy, about local traditions and the importance of connections to the land. Why do you think this is so important?

Berry: That starts with the obvious perception that land that is in human use requires human care. And this calls for keeping in mind the history of such land, of what has worked well on it and the mistakes that have been made on it. To lose this living memory of what has happened to the place is really to lose an economic asset.

I’m more and more concerned with the economic values of such intangibles as affection, knowledge, and memory. A deep familiarity between a local community and the local landscape is a dear thing, just in human terms. It’s also, down the line, money in the bank because it helps you to preserve the working capital of the place.

e360: You along with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute have proposed a 50-year farm bill. Can you explain what that is and how it would differ from typical US farm bills?

Berry: Unlike the typical US farm bill, the 50-Year Farm Bill attempts to address the real and ongoing problems of agriculture: erosion, toxicity, loss of genetic and species diversity, and the destruction of rural communities, or the destruction, where it still survives, of the culture of husbandry. It begins with the fact that at present, 80% of the land is planted annually in annual crops such as corn and beans, and 20% in perennials. It proposes a 50-year program for the gradual inversion of that ratio to 80% perennial cover and 20% annuals. It’s pretty clear that annual plants are nature’s emergency service. They’re the plants that come in after, say, a landslide, after the land has been exposed, and they give it a temporary cover while the perennials are getting started. So our predominantly annual agriculture keeps the land in a state of emergency.

It’s hard to make a permanent agriculture on the basis of an emergency strategy. By now the planted acreages have grown so large that most soybean and corn fields, for instance, are not seeded to cover crops, and so they lie exposed to the weather all winter. You can drive through Iowa in April before the new crops have been planted and started to grow, and you don’t see anything green mile after mile. It’s more deserted than a desert. And the soil erosion rates in Iowa are scandalous.

e360: I know you’ve had people tell you that your writing has inspired them to think about chucking their jobs and their city life and go farm. What do you tell them?

Berry: Well, I try to recommend caution. You don’t want somebody who’s 45 or 50 years old, who doesn’t know anything about farming, to throw up his or her present life and undertake to make a living from farming at a time when farmers, experienced farmers, are failing and going out of business. So characteristically I’ve said, “If you do this, keep your town job. If you’re not independently wealthy, you’ve got to have a dependable income from somewhere off the farm.” And I’ve tried to stress the difference between depending on the weather, on nature, for an income and depending on a salary. There’s a very wide gulf between those two kinds of dependence.

e360: Three years ago you participated in a sit-in at the governor’s office in Kentucky over the issue of mountaintop removal mining. What was that like, and why did you get involved with it in the first place?

Berry: I got involved because I was tired of talking. I saw that we were going to Frankfort [the state capital] every year and trying to talk to senators and representatives in the General Assembly, and to the governor if we could.Their very understandable impulse was to get rid of us as quickly as possible and have us leave feeling good… There are two parties in Kentucky — the party of coal and the party of everything else. Both the Democratic politicians and the Republican politicians, mostly, in most areas of the state, have to pay homage to coal, to even think about running for office.

So it was clear that talking wasn’t going to do any good. I don’t think what we wound up doing did any good either, but we had to raise the stakes somehow. And so we did go to Frankfort, confront the governor, and we had a list of requests that he would have to grant or he would not get rid of us. And he pulled a pretty smart trick on us. He invited us to spend the weekend. For obvious reasons, he didn’t want pictures in the paper of these innocent people being led off in handcuffs, and he said “Just stay, be my guests.” He outsmarted us. But he couldn’t neutralize us — the circumstance that he put us in really gave us a lot of visibility, a lot of contact with the press, and attracted a lot of sympathy.
e360: Do you think any positive developments have occurred since then?

Berry: No. I think we’ve got to keep up our opposition to land abuse and we’ve got to continue to communicate what that’s all about and what it signifies. What it signifies is that some people are willing to go the limit in earth destruction, to put it entirely at risk and destroy it entirely to preserve “our way of life.” A lot of people are willing to tolerate that.

Mountaintop removal is as near total destruction as you can imagine, because it does away with the forest, it does away with the topsoil that sustained the forest, it does away with the very topography — even people’s family graveyards go. And it’s done in complete disregard not only of the land but of the people who live downhill, whose lives are threatened, whose water supplies are destroyed, whose homes are damaged. The people downhill, downstream, and ahead of us in time are totally disregarded.

e360: As someone who’s followed your writing over the years, it seems to me that in some ways you’ve become more radical in your thinking, unlike a lot of people who as they get older tend to become more conservative. Do you think that’s true, and if so, why?

Berry: It’s true. One reason is that as I’ve grown older I’ve understood more clearly the difficulties that we’re in, the bad fix that we’re in and that we’re leaving to our children. And as I’ve grown older I’ve understood that when I put my comfort on the line as a protester or whatever, I’m doing what old people ought to do. I have less life to live than the young people. I think the old people ought to be the first ones in line to risk arrest.
e360: I’ve heard you describing the difference between optimism and hope, and you said that in terms of the issues you really care about, you would not describe yourself as optimistic but as hopeful. Can you explain that?

Berry: The issue of hope is complex and the sources of hope are complex. The things hoped for tend to be specific and to imply an agenda of work, things that can be done. Optimism is a general program that suggests that things are going to come out swell, pretty much whether we help out or not. This is largely unjustified by circumstances and history. One of the things that I think people on my side of these issues are always worried about is the ready availability of cynicism, despair, nihilism — those things that really are luxuries that permit people to give up, relax about the problems. Relax and let them happen. Another thing that can bring that about is so-called objectivity — the idea that this way might be right but on the other hand the opposite way might be right. We find this among academic people pretty frequently — the idea that you don’t take a stand, you just talk about the various possibilities.

But our side requires commitment, it requires effort, it requires a continual effort to define and understand what is possible — not only what is desirable, but what is possible in the immediate circumstances.
e360: You’ve had many opportunities over the years to leave Port Royal — you had teaching jobs at universities — but you made the decision to go back and stay there. Why?

Berry: Well because I love the place. Both my father and my mother came from the Port Royal neighborhood, and I was one of the farm-raised young people who loved both farming and the place. Port Royal is what a lot of people have been schooled to call “nowhere.” I remember a college student who told me, “I’m from a little nowhere place in Illinois.” And I said, ”Wait a minute. I want to ask you something: Who told you that where you come from in Illinois is nowhere? There is no such place as nowhere.” We’ve dumped our garbage in our places, we’ve polluted them and mistreated them in every way, because we thought they were nowhere. It’s extremely important, it seems to me, that those nowhere places should be inhabited by people who will speak for them.

e360: You’ve had four careers, really — writer, farmer, activist, and teacher. How do you see those parts of your life fitting together?

Berry: A question I’m often asked is, “How have you balanced these various pursuits?” And the word “balance” always implies that I have balanced them, and of course I haven’t. It’s been difficult and sometimes a struggle to keep it all going.

e360: Difficult in what way?

Berry: Well, to find time for it all. I’ve known writers — I think it’s true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.
• Roger Cohn is the editor of Yale Environment 360

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/06/wendell-berry-americans-sustainability-joke

Whole Foods Pushing It's Comfort Zone

     Disclaimer - I own some Whole Foods stock.

     Will have to check on this store in the near future - from The Motley Fool -

Why This One Store Means So Much to Whole Foods Market Inc.

By Brian Stoffel
September 28, 2014

When you think of your typical Whole Foods (NASDAQ: WFM  ) location, what type of neighborhood comes to mind? For most people, the answer is easy, whether it's in the city or the burbs: wealthy
Not surprisingly, these types of neighborhoods have helped Whole Foods grow from an industry outsider two decades ago to the most important grocer on the country's landscape. And perhaps no city is a better blueprint for what Whole Foods hopes to accomplish than the greater Chicagoland area, where there are currently 19 Whole Foods locations.
Here's what the breakdown of each location looks like, given their unique zip codes.
Even outliers can be explained away, like 60626, which is located in South Evanston. It should be pointed out that this particular location used to be a Wild Oats before Whole Foods acquired the chain. Its close proximity to the wealthy zip code just to the north accounts for a large base of business.
As a whole, these locations clearly represent a better-off demographic than the average American community, and help explain at least some of Whole Foods' success.
But lately, many are worried that the company has become a victim of its own success. "The company is simply running out of wealthy neighborhoods, and competition will take away the lower-end customers," the bears say.
Time will tell if that's true or not. But for those looking for a crystal ball into the future, one location in American Southeast could be the closest thing we have to glimpsing into Whole Foods' futureBut lately, many are worried that the company has become a victim of its own success. "The company is simply running out of wealthy neighborhoods, and competition will take away the lower-end customers," the bears say.
Time will tell if that's true or not. But for those looking for a crystal ball into the future, one location in American Southeast could be the closest thing we have to glimpsing into Whole Foods' futureOn Aug. 13, 2013, the city of Savannah, Georgia, opened its very first Whole Foods location. The store is located on what used to be a lot for car sales, but had since been abandoned following the Great Recession.
Though it's still early in the game for the company, any success that Whole Foods experiences in Savannah could be a huge deal moving forward. That's because the location isn't anything like what many think of as a "typical" Whole Foods location.And in case you were thinking that this location could benefit from some wealthy neighbors, consider a few key facts. Though Hilton Head is just 30 miles from Savannah, the wealthy South Carolina tourist hub already has a Whole Foods.
What's more, the three zip codes that share a physical border with this particular Savannah Whole Foods location are similar in makeup. The median household income across the three averages to roughly $36,000, with 27% living in poverty, and 32% having obtained a college degree.
How to succeed in unlikely areasThere are lots of strategies and assumptions underpinning Whole Foods' plan in Savannah. It might surprise some to know that, typically, Whole Foods has focused far more on an educated population rather than a wealthy one -- though the two tend to be highly correlated.
But with this move, the company is deviating from the plan. One possible explanation is that the healthy food movement has become so prevalent -- it's the champion cause of our First Lady -- that those without a college education are also well aware of the benefits of healthy eating.
The company is also creating a highly tailored experience for patrons in Savannah as well. For instance, the building reflects the historical Victorian architecture of the South, there is a mural on the side of the building painted by local college students, the Parlor -- a beer and wine lounge/bar -- serves many local specialties, and a mobile kitchen stands outside to offer food for those on the run.

The Whole Foods location in Savannah offers an outdoor, mobile kitchen. Photo: Whole Foods
The company itself does not break out sales for specific locations, so its difficult to get an immediate reading on how well the store has fared in its first full year of operation. And by being located in Wisconsin myself, a trip to Savannah -- tempting as it sounds in autumn -- isn't in the cards.
If you do live in the Savannah area, leave a comment in the box below to let us know about your experience. The most important thing for investors to watch is if the company keeps the store open or -- even better -- if it rolls out more locations in Savannah because of its initial success.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/09/28/why-this-one-store-means-so-much-to-whole-foods-ma.aspx

Mission Impossible?

    When I was a kid in the 1960's I loved the TV series Mission: Impossible. Characters in the show regularly employed very realistic latex masks as disguises and a variety of low tech means to thwart high tech systems. So it is with interest that I note various news outlets reporting now that using fingerprint scans for id is not reliable. Up til now, fingerprints have been said to be a secure method of identification but now not so sure.......
    I also did a search on latex masks. One of the top results is a company that advertises that their latex masks are of the same quality as those in Hollywood movies. Not sure if that is Mission: Impossible quality but it does make me wonder about just how anonymous someone can be - for good or bad purposes. And it definitely brings up issues of someone actually impersonating another person.
   From The Washington Post -

Why fingerprints scans may not be the future of digital verification

By Andrea Peterson December 29, 2014

Fingerprint scanners are becoming increasingly mainstream -- they even come built-in many Apple devices.
But researchers are finding ways to spoof biometric ID methods, and they come with their own set of privacy and security drawbacks.
Biometrics researcher Jan Krisller demonstrated how he spoofed a politician’s fingerprint using just a high definition photo at a conference held by the Chaos Computer Club in Germany this weekend. Krisller, who also goes by "Starbug," and the group previously showed off a way to spoof Apple's Touch ID system by creating a fake finger modeled off a fingerprint left on a glass surface.
One key problem with biometrics is that they are permanent.
The much maligned password is less secure than using a unique biological marker to identify yourself, but it can be changed if it is leaked or compromised in some way. Your fingerprints, on the other hand, are yours forever.
And the immutable nature of the fingerprints becomes even more concerning when you consider how public they can be. You leave prints out in the world just going through your day -- and Krisller shows data needed to fake the prints can also be captured remotely without direct contact.
"Biometrics are not secrets," American Civil Liberties Union analyst Jay Stanley explained to The Washington Post earlier this year.
As fingerprint scanners become more and more common, they are also raising legal questions. At least one court has ruled that police could compel a suspect to give up his fingerprint, but not his passcode, in order to unlock and search his cellphone.


Andrea Peterson covers technology policy for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, transparency, surveillance and open government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/29/why-fingerprints-scans-may-not-be-the-future-of-digital-verification/?hpid=z19