As reported by MSNBC, Julian Assange has lost his appeal to London's High Court, and is once again facing extradition to Sweden. His lawyers have indicated that they plan an appeal to Britain's Supreme Court. Assange has steered supporters to a website titled Sweden vs. Assange for details and updates.
Jonathan Patz is the author of a new study indicating the "Four Way Win" that occurs when people choose bicycling over the use of automobiles. I'm completely on board, and I speak from experience as a person who commutes by bicycle more often than not to my job, which is about 5 miles from my home. The study by Patz offers some impressive numbers:
In the study, published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, Patz and his colleagues looked to the more than 30 million people residing in urban and suburban areas of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. They asked: What if during the nicest six months of the year, those residents left their cars at home for round-trips of five miles or less? And what if they chose to replace half of those short car trips, which account for about 20 percent of all vehicle miles traveled, with cycling? According to their calculations, making those short trips on bicycles could save approximately four trillion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, 1,100 lives and $7 billion in mortality and health care costs for the region every year. "Fighting global climate change could be one of the greatest public health opportunities we've had in a century."
If you'd like to hear about a love story between a human animal and an octopus, with a lot of science stirred in, take a look at Sy Montgomery's "Deep Intellect," in this month's Orion Magazine.
At Huffpo, Robert Kuttner makes the case for completely abolishing credit default swaps. Many reformers are focusing on enacting a financial transaction tax, but Kuttner argues that this worthy reform falls far short of what is ultimately needed for meaningful financial reform. Therefore, in addition to reenacting the Glass-Steagall Act, Kuttner seeks to abolish credit default swaps:
The financial transaction tax has become a useful symbol of the need to rein in the banks. Its enactment would mark an important turning point -- it would show that the power of the banks can be broken. And if the US government keeps opposing it, the EU should enact it unilaterally -- every global bank does business in Europe.
But such a tax would be only a small first step. Banks would still invent exotic instruments and trade them; they'd just have to pay a small tax.
It's time to simply abolish credit default swaps and similar exotic, impenetrable, essentially unregulated securities. They add nothing to economic efficiency, they line bankers' pockets, and they add massively to global financial risks. Swaps were only invented in the 1990s. The world got along beautifully -- much better in fact -- without them.
Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos.How often do you cross paths with a parent who is attempting to make his or her children in the parent's image and likeness? I see it on a regular basis. The prototypical case is the parent who didn't make it to the Broadway stage who tries to turn his/her child into a Broadway performer. You often see parents who demand athletic excellence from their kids, often (it seems) in an effort to compensate for the parent's failed strivings to make it big in sports. This style of parenting reaches every high-earning or high-prestige profession. Or maybe it's not to make up for the parents own failings as much as it is an attempt to create a trophy child so that, at cocktail parties, the parent can nonchalantly drop a few hints about his or her child's (sometimes admittedly spectacular) accomplishments. This afternoon, a friend sent me a perfect antidote for this mindset. It's a poem by Kahlil Gibran, titled "On Children." Upon reading it, I was reminded of the following quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.”