Browsing PBH By Articles

When “Alternative” Becomes Mainstream

The Article: Sunny Uplands by Geoffrey Car in The Economist.

The Text: Rebranding is always a tricky exercise, but for one field of technology 2013 will be the year when its proponents need to bite the bullet and do it. That field is alternative energy. The word “alternative”, with its connotations of hand-wringing greenery and a need for taxpayer subsidy, has to go. And in 2013 it will. “Renewable” power will start to be seen as normal.

Wind farms already provide 2% of the world’s electricity, and their capacity is doubling every three years. If that growth rate is maintained, wind power will overtake nuclear’s contribution to the world’s energy accounts in about a decade. Though it still has its opponents, wind is thus already a grown-up technology. But it is in the field of solar energy, currently only a quarter of a percent of the planet’s electricity supply, but which grew 86% last year, that the biggest shift of attitude will be seen, for sunlight has the potential to disrupt the electricity market completely.

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Obama Attacks Press Freedoms…Again.

The Article: Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian.

The Text: It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined – in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week’s controversy over the DOJ’s pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests – something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist – something done every day in Washington – and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage”.

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The Issue Of Color In America

What a rainbow of a week it’s been in the colorblind United States. Reds, blues, yellows, greens and purples streaked the skies Wednesday, following the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and kicked back Proposition 8 back to California courts. Homosexual men and women were left in tears (as was Jesus, according to New Testament-touting troglodyte Mike Huckabee) as it seemed equality was no longer a lofty, holed ideal but a palpable reality that included them in its rich stitching.

And yet, as it so often goes in the American struggle for civil rights, the gains we make in one arena are tempered by our willful failure in another. 24 hours before a chorus of cheers reverberated about the imposing columns before the Supreme Court’s halls, a sobering silence cloaked its patrons as they received word that some of the most successful civil rights legislation the United States has ever seen, the Voting Rights Act, had effectively been gutted in yet another 5-4 split decision.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts stated that the United States has “changed”, and that old formulas for determining which states require preclearance before revising voting laws, procedures or locales are out-of-date, unfair and place an undue, singular burden on certain states whose histories have evolved since 1965 (pay no mind to the fact that typically, a burden becomes “undue” when the costs of a requirement outweigh its benefits, which in this case would be ensuring that the Fifteenth Amendment is adhered to at the local, state and federal level, and that minorities are not prevented from voting based on their race; apparently the pursuit of equality is secondary to the bureaucratic hassles imposed on states with a history of opposing it).

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Paula Deen, Voting Rights, And The “New” South

The Article: Paula Deen, voting rights and the ‘New South’ by Rob Tornoe in NewsWorks.

The Text: People have changed.

That seems to be the imputes behind a divided Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. The court ruled 5-4 that Section 4 under the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, twisting logic to determine that discrimination isn’t rampant enough in Southern states to warrant continued restrictions.

Considering it took the Attorney General of Texas just two hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling to advance a voter ID law and redistricting map that was blocked last year for its discrimination against black and Latino voters, I’m not sure their ruling was sound. Texas isn’t the only state to quickly move to restrict voting rights – North Carolina and Mississippi also plan to pass strict voter ID laws in the wake of the court’s ruling. ??”Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissention. “When confronting the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination, and the most fundamental right in our democratic system, Congress’ power to act is at its height.”

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Notes On The Next American Revolution

The Article: What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About The Next American Revolution in The National Memo.

The Text: Chapter One: How to Detect a System Problem Without Really Trying

People toss around the phrase It’s the system pretty loosely in everyday language. Usually they mean that things are sort of set up, by either design or accident, to run the way they run—and that the game is pretty well rigged so that those at the top (and their organizations) control the action. You can’t really buck the system: Too much power, too much red tape, too much bureaucracy—they’ll wear you down.

And so on.

That’s not a bad way to start thinking about the big system that defines the overarching contours of our national life—namely, the large corporate-dominated economic system and the heavily constrained political system that set the terms of reference for almost everything else.

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