#only recognized in pennsylvania since may 2014!!!!!

[screamlet]

being back in a fandom where i write about american people in their 30s and 40s, i've started laughing hysterically (negative, terrified) when i remember that gay marriage in california was only legal as of 2013. and then recognized federally in 2015. that's NOTHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING it's been NOTHING it's been FIVE MINUTES!!!!!!!!!!!! i was there (an adult) and feels like it was 30 years ago and it REALLY wasn't, lol.

[news4dzhozhar]

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on federal executions and a new study of death penalty procedures last week. The move is a small step that fails to make good on President Joe Biden’s campaign promises to end capital punishment. Following on the heels of the Justice Department‘s effort to restore Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence, Garland’s announcement sends a muddled message about what the administration wants to do about capital punishment.

Together, these two actions suggest that there is not much courage behind the administration’s rhetorical anti–death penalty commitments. Opponents of the death penalty should expect and demand more while the current Democratic administration is in office.

Recent history cautions that announcing a moratorium is often a substitute for rather than a step toward ending capital punishment. It saves lives for the time it is in place, but a moratorium is easily reversed if and when a pro–death penalty administration comes to power.

The actions of the Biden administration display the same reluctance about the death penalty that characterized the presidency of Barack Obama. It may be poised to repeat the mistake that Obama made when he left capital punishment in place for his successor, President Donald Trump.

When he took office in January 2009, Obama continued the de facto moratorium on federal executions that had been in place since 2003. And, in 2014, following Oklahoma’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett, he directed his attorney general, Eric Holder, to undertake a comprehensive review of how the death penalty was being applied in the United States.

Obama, unlike Biden, never openly embraced abolitionism, even as he acknowledged deep flaws in America’s death penalty system. As the former president explained in 2015, “There are certain crimes that are so beyond the pale that I understand society’s need to express its outrage. I’ve not been opposed to the death penalty in theory, but in practice it’s deeply troubling.”

By the end of his term, the study Obama had commissioned, like many similar studies launched by the federal government, had still not seen the light of day. But that failure mattered little, since the review had largely symbolic value. It was at best a holding action, a signal meant to appease death penalty opponents.

Obama missed the chance to make sure that federal executions, with all the flaws that he recognized, would not resume when he left office. As a result, the system of capital punishment was there for Donald Trump to use. And, showing none of Obama’s reluctance, use it he did.

Moratoria of the kind announced by Garland have a checkered record in advancing the abolitionist cause. They sometimes serve as a way station on the road to abolition. But not always. And the jury is out on what path the new moratorium portends.

A key moment in death penalty moratorium efforts in the United States occurred in 1997 when the American Bar Association, the nation’s largest voluntary association of lawyers and law students, called for a complete halt to executions in the United States. The ABA proclaimed that the death penalty as “currently administered” is not compatible with the values of the U. S. Constitution.

The ABA called “upon each jurisdiction that imposes capital punishment not to carry out the death penalty until the jurisdiction implements policies and procedures … intended to (1) ensure that death penalty cases are administered fairly and impartially, in accordance with due process, and (2) minimize the risk that innocent persons may be executed.”

Note that the language of the ABA resolution was conditional and contingent in its condemnation of death as a punishment. Even as it called for a cessation of executions, the ABA appeared to hold out hope for a process of reform that might bring the death penalty within constitutionally acceptable norms.

Illustrating the stark difference between calling for a moratorium and embracing abolition, the ABA went out of its way to state that it was “taking no position on the death penalty.”

In January 2000, then–Illinois Gov. George Ryan made that state the first in the nation to heed the ABA’s call for a moratorium. As he said at the time, “Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate.”

Ryan believed that the moratorium would allow citizens to get used to having no executions and help them understand that the death penalty affords them no real security.

In Illinois the moratorium turned out to be a major and important first step on that state’s road to abolition. Ryan followed up on it in 2003 when he used his clemency power to pardon or commute the sentences of everyone on the state’s death row. Eight years later, another governor signed legislation abolishing capital punishment and replaced it with life without parole.

In 2007, New Jersey followed the Illinois moratorium-to-abolition playbook, even as that has not been the usual route to ending capital punishment.

The experience of other states indicates that a moratorium may be a substitute for, rather than a step toward, abolition. Oregon in 2011, Pennsylvania in 2015, California in 2019 all announced a halt to executions, but none shows signs of movement to permanently ending capital punishment.

And Maryland offers another stark reminder of the sometimes transient quality of death penalty moratoria. In 2002, Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening declared a moratorium on executions. Eight months later, it was lifted by his successor, Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who would go on to preside over two executions during his term in office.

This history further cautions that Garland’s announcement may not be a signal that abolition of the federal death penalty is on the horizon.

Added to that, the attorney general’s call for yet another series of policy reviews has a depressingly familiar ring to it. Do we really need another study to document the death penalty’s brutality and its crippling flaws?

This purportedly abolitionist president and his attorney general should act to make sure that no one again faces a federal death penalty. Biden should now use his executive power to empty the federal death row by commuting the sentences of the 50 people currently being held there.

Commutation, not a moratorium, is the only way to ensure that executions do not return the next time someone like Trump is in office.

[drapilnessu1977-blog]

Aid in Dying Soon Will be Available to More Americans. Few Will Choose It.

On Aug. 1, New Jersey will turn into the eighth state to enable specialists to endorse deadly medicine to in critical condition patients who need to take their lives. On Sept. 15, Maine will turn into the ninth.

So by October, 22 percent of Americans will live in spots where occupants with a half year or less to live can, in principle, practice some command over the time and way of their demises. (The others: Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana, California, Colorado and Hawaii, just as the District of Columbia.)

But while the crusade for help in kicking the bucket keeps on making gains, supporters are progressively worried about what occurs after these laws are passed. Many power the perishing to explore an excessively confused procedure of solicitations and holding up periods, pundits say.

And quit arrangements вђ" which enable specialists to decrease to take part and medicinal services frameworks to preclude their investment вђ" are confining access even in certain spots where help in kicking the bucket is legal.

“There are what I call deserts, where it␙s hard to discover an office that enables specialists to participate,␝ said Samantha Trad, the California state chief of Compassion & Choices, the biggest national support bunch for help in dying.

Still, contrasted with the national media glare that has observed past battles about these laws, the movementвђ™s late triumphs have created moderately little furor.

“We’re nearing a tipping point,␝ said Peg Sandeen, official executive of the Death With Dignity National Center, which supervised the Maine crusade. “The issue, while still disputable, is less scary.␝

The New Jersey bill had neared entry a few times since it was presented seven years prior, however crashed in 2014 when Chris Christie, the representative at the time, compromised a veto. At long last, administrators passed the Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act this winter, and Gov. Philip D. Murphy marked it in April.

In Maine, the state lawmaking body casted a ballot yes this spring, however supporters were uncertain what the new senator, Janet Mills, would do. As in New Jersey, a Democratic representative supplanted an active Republican who had guaranteed a veto.

Gov. Plants marked the law a month ago. “I do trust it is a correct that ought to be ensured by law вђ" the privilege to make extreme decisions,вђќ she said.

What’s changed?

All these laws expect states to follow utilization and distribute insights. Their reports demonstrate that whether a state has a half year or 20 years of experience, the extent of passings including help in biting the dust (additionally known, to supportersвђ™ aversion, as doctor helped suicide) stays little, a small amount of a rate point.

California, for instance, in 2017 got the ordered state records for only 632 individuals whoвђ™d made the vital two verbal solicitations to a doctor, after which 241 specialists composed medicines for 577 patients. In excess of 269,000 Californians in all kicked the bucket that year.

With such information demonstrating no dangerous incline toward boundless use or misuse, вђњa parcel of the theoretical cases our rivals made never again convey such a great amount of weight with lawmakers,вђќ said Kim Callinan, CEO of Compassion & Choices.

Ms. Callinan likewise indicated changing demeanors inside the restorative network, when a very much supported wellspring of restriction. As of late, various national associations and twelve state therapeutic social orders have rather embraced unbiased stances.

“It makes everything fair a little,␝ she said.

Opponents, including Catholic associations and some inability activists, still decry these laws. In March, a guide in-biting the dust bill passed the Maryland House of Delegates yet bombed after a tie vote in the Senate. Adversaries are endeavoring a voting form activity to annul Maineвђ™s new law and seeking after a moderate moving court case to negate Californiaвђ™s.

Public feeling surveys reliably show wide help for help in kicking the bucket, be that as it may. Empathy & Choices says its up and coming authoritative targets incorporate Massachusetts, Maryland once more, New Mexico, New York and Nevada.

But the tirelessly modest number of clients recommends that most Americans near death would not by and by decide to self-ingest barbiturates, regardless of whether they backing sanctioning that alternative. The low numbers may likewise reflect trouble in really utilizing these laws.

A ongoing overview of 270 California emergency clinics, distributed in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that year and a half after usage of the stateвђ™s End of Life Option Act, in excess of 60 percent вђ" a considerable lot of them religiously partnered вђ" precluded subsidiary doctors to participate.

Compassion & Choices is escalating endeavors to influence nearby human services frameworks, specialists and hospices to consent to consider patientsвђ™ requests.

Even help in-biting the dust laws long on the books are starting to draw recharged scrutiny.

For decades, the model has been the first-in-the-country Oregon law, which produced results in 1997. It requires an at death's door patient to see two specialists, make two oral solicitations for a deadly remedy in addition to one recorded as a hard copy, and face a 15-day holding up period.

Every state law however one joins those components. (In Montana, a court authorized guide in biting the dust, so thereвђ™s no statute.)

“There’s such a large number of barriers in the current legislation,␝ said Ms. Callinan, whose association has since quite a while ago advanced that enactment. “They’ve really made it unreasonably hard for patients to get past the process.␝

Indeed, an examination from Kaiser Permanente Southern California, a wellbeing framework that supports patients who solicitation and meet prerequisites for help in kicking the bucket, demonstrates that at any rate 33% of the individuals who ask about it become too sick to even consider completing the procedure, or pass on before they can qualify.

Yet states are authorizing considerably increasingly assumed shields. Hawaii, whose law produced results in January, requires a 20-day pause; the two its law and a proposed Massachusetts law include an ordered psychological well-being consultation.

By differentiate, the Oregon lawmaking body as of late affirmed a correction deferring the holding up period in situations where the doctor accepts the patient will probably kick the bucket inside 15 days. Gov. Kate Brown has until Aug. 9 to sign it.

Perhaps, Ms. Callinan proposed, help in-biting the dust laws shouldnвђ™t require holding up periods.

“It sets aside individuals a long effort to locate a first specialist, to make an arrangement, to locate a subsequent specialist, to discover a pharmacist,␝ she said. “The process itself is a holding up period,␝ one frequently surpassing 15 days.

Since provincial territories face doctor deficiencies, Compassion & Choices has additionally asked that attendant experts and doctor partners be permitted to give help in biting the dust in states where they can lawfully compose medicines.

In Oregon, a veteran state administrator has stepped toward extending access.

State Rep. Mitch Greenlick has presented a few bills that would allow those in the beginning periods of dementia and other neurodegenerative sicknesses to utilize help in biting the dust, verifying remedies they could then utilize later as their diseases progressed.

“You could make the solicitation when you were psychologically ready to do it,␝ he said.

Every existing state law bars that. Those mentioning help in kicking the bucket must have mental limit; dementia patients will have lost it when theyвђ™re inside a half year of biting the dust. National gatherings determinedly contradict Mr. Greenlickвђ™s propositions.

Yet those at increased hazard for Alzheimerвђ™s infection, the most widely recognized type of dementia, are as of now very much aware of help in-kicking the bucket laws, and some would select to utilize them, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania as of late reported.

They talked with 50 more established grown-ups took a crack at a medication study, most with family ancestries of Alzheimer␙s, all found to have raised degrees of the biomarker amyloid. “We portray it as an expanded yet dubious danger of creating Alzheimer␙s disease,␝ said Emily Largent, a Penn bioethicist.

The teamвђ™s meetings uncovered that around 66% of the gathering would reject help in kicking the bucket and around 15 percent had irresolute reactions. In any case, one of every five said they would seek after it in the event that they turned out to be psychologically weakened, were enduring or troubling adored ones.

Overall, вђњvery few comprehended that they wouldnвђ™t be eligibleвђќ for deadly solutions under current laws on the off chance that they created dementia, Dr. Largent said.

But they were strikingly open to lawful guide in dying.

“It was imperative to have it available,␝ she said. “Even in the event that they believed they wouldn␙t pick help in d

[orbemnews]

Biden to Raise Minimum Wage for Federal Contractors to $15: Live Updates Here’s what you need to know: Joseph R. Biden Jr., then vice president, at a 2015 event calling for a $15 minimum wage in New York.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times President Biden plans to sign an executive order on Tuesday raising the minimum wage paid by federal contractors to $15 an hour, the latest in a set of ambitious pro-labor moves at the outset of his administration. The new minimum is expected to take effect next year and is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of workers, according to a White House document. The current minimum is $10.95 under an order that President Barack Obama signed in 2014. Like that order, the new one will require that the new minimum wage rise with inflation. White House economists believed the increase would not lead to significant job losses, a finding in line with recent research on the minimum wage, and that it was unlikely to cost taxpayers more money, two administration officials said in a call with reporters. They argued that the higher wage would lead to greater productivity and lower turnover. The White House also contends that although the number of workers directly affected by the increase is relatively small as a share of the economy, the executive order will indirectly raise wages beyond federal contractors by forcing other employers to bid up pay as they compete for workers. Several cities have a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, and several states have laws that will raise their minimum wage to at least that level in the coming years. There is so far little evidence on how a $15 minimum wage affects employment in lower-cost areas of such states. Two years ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, but the legislation has faced long odds in the Senate. Mr. Biden sought to incorporate such a measure in his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package so that it could pass on a simple majority vote, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled that it could not be included. Mr. Biden’s executive order will also eliminate the so-called tipped minimum wage for federal contractors, which currently allows employers to pay tipped workers $7.65 an hour as long as their tips put them over the regular minimum wage. Under the new minimum, all workers must be paid at least $15 an hour. The order will technically begin a rule-making process that is expected to conclude by early next year. The wage will be incorporated into new contracts and existing contracts as they are extended. Traffic in Philadelphia last month. BP reported higher earnings on Tuesday, and said it expected demand for oil would continue to recover from the pandemic.Credit…Matt Rourke/Associated Press BP reported a sharply higher profit for the first quarter of 2021 on Tuesday, signaling that after a grim 2020, oil companies’ earnings are recovering along with demand for their products. BP said that underlying replacement cost profit, the metric most closely watched by analysts, was $2.6 billion, up from $791 million in the period year earlier. The London giant said that the price it received for its oil in the quarter was up more than 20 percent. BP described its trading and marketing of natural gas, where prices also increased, as “exceptionally strong.” Citing strong economic growing in China and the United States, BP said that it expected the oil market to continue to recover from the effects of the pandemic. Bernard Looney, the chief executive, has said he wants to use the cash from oil and gas operations to finance a shift toward electric power and other clean energy. In the first quarter, the plan seemed to work well. The company raked in about $10.9 billion, a sum that included revenue from sales of fossil fuel businesses, among them a stake in a gas field in Oman. Because of divestments, BP’s oil production fell by 22 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. At the same time, BP expanded into the offshore wind business. It entered into a partnership with Equinor, the Norwegian energy company that is developing wind farms off the East Coast of the United States, and is acquiring offshore wind acreage off Britain at what some in the industry considered high prices. BP also said that, having met debt reduction targets, it would resume a program of buying back shares, a way to increase the price of BP stock; it had not bought back shares since the first quarter of last year, as its business was battered by the pandemic. In the second quarter the company plans to spend $500 million on such purchases. Last summer, BP also cut its dividend for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon disaster a decade ago, to 5.25 cents a share. The dividend will remain at that level, the company said. BP said it could generate a surplus with oil prices above $45 a barrel. Lately, prices have been considerably higher, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, at about $66 a barrel. Talasheia Dedmon enrolled her son Braylon in a college savings account through SEED for Oklahoma Kids, an effort to help a new generation climb the educational ladder and build assets. Credit…September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times An experiment called SEED for Oklahoma Kids, or SEED OK, is one of a growing number of efforts by cities and states — governed by Democrats and Republicans alike — to help a new generation climb the educational ladder and build assets SEED OK is a far-reaching research project begun in Oklahoma 14 years ago to study whether creating savings accounts containing $1,000 for newborns would improve their graduation rates and their chances of going to college or trade school years later, Patricia Cohen reports for The New York Times. Research about the Oklahoma project published this month by the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, which created SEED OK, found that families that had been given accounts were more college-focused and contributed more of their own money than those that hadn’t been. And the effects are strongest among low-income families. The 1,300-plus children who were chosen at random to be given accounts in 2007 had an average of $3,243 saved by the end of 2019. Among the control group — another 1,300 children who were randomly selected to take part but were not given any money — only 4 percent had an account. Proposals at the federal level to establish savings accounts at birth, for college, homes, business or retirement savings, go back to the 1990s. Canada, Israel, South Korea and Singapore have established versions of the idea. Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Illinois are among the states that have created programs. Technical problems marred the Small Business Association’s first attempt at accepting applications for the grant program.Credit…Zack Wittman for The New York Times After months of delays and technical problems, the federal government finally opened a $16 billion grant fund for music club operators, theater owners and others in the live-event business on Monday. Thousands of people hit the website for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program the moment it began accepting applications. Speed mattered: The money — awarded on a first-come-first-served basis — is widely expected to run out fast. One applicant posted a screenshot showing that he was in line behind more than 6,000 others waiting for their turn to apply. “Hunger Games” memes — “May the odds be ever in your favor” — popped up in Twitter posts from desperate business owners venting their collective anxiety. But this time, the system stayed up. As of 5 p.m. on Monday, the agency had received 6,040 grant applications, according to Andrea Roebker, an agency spokeswoman. Nearly 8,400 more had been created but not yet been completed. Sarah Elger, chief executive of Pseudonym Productions, an events production company in Philadelphia, successfully submitted her application 16 minutes after she got access to the system. “It was such a relief,” Ms. Elger said. She was one of thousands of business owners who had their hopes dashed earlier this month, when the Small Business Administration, the agency that runs the program, tried — and failed — to start taking applications. After four hours, the agency took the system offline for what turned into weeks of technology repair work. Ms. Elger estimated that she uploaded more than 100 documents for her application, which she and her husband, Ricky Brigante, spent months preparing. They knew they would have to move quickly once the application website opened. “We turned it into a game,” Ms. Elger said. “We had lots of folders on the desktop and raced through the uploads.” The Small Business Administration said it would immediately start reviewing the applications, which are intended to yield grants for 45 percent of applicants’ prepandemic gross earned annual revenue, up to $10 million. “We recognize the urgency,” said Barb Carson, the deputy associate administrator of the agency’s Office of Disaster Assistance. “With venue operators in danger of closing, every day that passes by is a day that these businesses cannot afford.” The program, created in the $900 billion economic support package that President Donald J. Trump approved in December, is the first large direct-to-businesses grant program the Small Business Administration has ever run. The process, for both the agency and applicants, has for months been fraught with complexity and confusion. John Russell, the executive director of the Montford Park Players, a nonprofit community theater group in Asheville, N.C., submitted his application on Monday afternoon. He is relying on the grant to help cover his group’s return to the stage. After a full year of hosting only virtual events, the group is planning to open its first full in-person production, the Shakespeare play “The Comedy of Errors,” next month. “We figured people are in the mood for comedy,” Mr. Russell said. The show’s actors are volunteers, but the production creates paid jobs for its director, stage manager, lighting designer, food vendors and others, as well as for the theater troupe’s support staff. The Small Business Administration is also preparing to open a second grant program, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, a $28.6 billion support fund for bars, restaurants and food trucks that was created in last month’s $1.9 trillion relief bill. That program is planning a seven-day test to help the agency avoid the kind of technical problems that plagued the venue program. Lyft lost $1.8 billion last year as the pandemic cut into its revenue.Credit…Mike Blake/Reuters Lyft will sell its unit devoted to developing autonomous vehicles to Woven Planet, a Toyota subsidiary, the companies announced on Monday. Woven Planet will pay $200 million in cash for Level 5, Lyft’s self-driving car initiative, and will follow up with additional payments of $350 million over five years. Lyft is among several tech companies that have stepped back from developing autonomous vehicles over the last year as the technology has proved difficult to master and the pandemic has placed pressure on the company’s bottom lines. In December, Uber essentially paid Aurora, a self-driving truck start-up, to take its autonomous vehicle unit. Some automotive executives have said they overestimated how soon the technology would be ready for the road. And although Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has recently expanded its operations, the chief executive of Waymo stepped down earlier this month to pursue “new adventures.” Lyft said unloading Level 5 would cut about $100 million in annual expenses, helping the company edge closer to profitability after the pandemic sliced into its revenue. Lyft lost $1.8 billion last year. The company is set to report earnings for the first three months of 2021 next month. Lyft will still have a team focused on third-party self-driving technology and will continue to collect data from trips to help train autonomous systems, the company said. “Not only will this transaction allow Lyft to focus on advancing our leading autonomous platform and transportation network, this partnership will help pull in our profitability timeline,” Lyft’s president, John Zimmer, said in a statement. Source link Orbem News #Biden #Contractors #Federal #Live #minimum #raise #Updates #Wage

[blackkudos]

Bryan Stevenson

Bryan A. Stevenson (born November 14, 1959) is an American lawyer, social justice activist, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a clinical professor at New York University School of Law. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, Stevenson has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped achieve court decisions that prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death, or to life imprisonment without parole. Stevenson has assisted in cases that have saved dozens of prisoners from the death penalty, advocated for poor people, and developed community-based reform litigation aimed at improving the administration of criminal justice.

He is working to establish The Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which will document each of the nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people that took place in the twelve states of the South from 1877 to 1950. He believes that the history of lynchings has influenced the subsequent high rate of death sentences in the South, where it has been disproportionately applied to minorities. A related museum, From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, will offer interpretations to show the connection between the post-Civil War period of lynchings to the high rate of executions and incarceration of people of color in the United States.

Early life and education

Born in 1959, Stevenson grew up in Milton, Delaware, a small rural town located in Southern Delaware. His father Howard Carlton Stevenson, Sr., had grown up in Milton, and his mother Alice Gertrude (Golden) Stevenson, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her family had moved to the city from Virginia in the Great Migration. Stevenson has two siblings: an older brother Howard, Jr. and a sister Christy. Both parents commuted to the northern part of the state for work: Howard, Sr. worked at a General Foods processing plant as a laboratory technician. His mother, Alice, was a bookkeeper at Dover Air Force Base and became an equal opportunity officer. She particularly emphasized the importance of education.

Stevenson's family attended the Prospect African Methodist Episcopal Church, where Stevenson played piano and sang in the choir. His later views were influenced by the strong faith of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where churchgoers were celebrated for 'standing up after having fallen down.' These experiences informed his belief that "each person in our society is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.”

When Stevenson was sixteen, his maternal grandfather, Clarence L. Golden, was stabbed to death in his Philadelphia home during a robbery. The killers received life sentences, an outcome Stevenson thought fair. Stevenson said of the murders: "Because my grandfather was older, his murder seemed particularly cruel. But I came from a world where we valued redemption over revenge."

As a child, Stevenson dealt with segregation and its legacy. He spent his first classroom years at a "colored" elementary school. By the time he entered the second grade, his school was formally desegregated, but the old rules from segregation still applied. Black kids played separately from white kids and were forced to use the back door of the school. Pools and other community facilities were informally segregated. Stevenson's father, having grown up in the area, took the ingrained racism in stride, but their mother noted that this was not right.

Stevenson attended Cape Henlopen High School and graduated in 1977. He played on the soccer and baseball teams. He also served as president of the student body and won American Legion public-speaking contests. His brother, Howard, takes some credit for helping hone Stevenson's rhetorical skills: “We argued the way brothers argue, but these were serious arguments, inspired I guess by our mother and the circumstances of our family growing up.” Stevenson earned straight A's and won a scholarship to Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. On campus, he directed the campus gospel choir. Stevenson graduated in 1981.

Stevenson received a full scholarship to attend Harvard Law School. During law school, as part of a class on race and poverty litigation with Elizabeth Bartholet, he worked for Stephen Bright's Southern Center for Human Rights, which represents death-row inmates throughout the South. During this work, Stevenson found his career calling. While at Harvard, he also earned a Master's in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Career

Southern Center for Human Rights

After graduating from Harvard in 1985, Stevenson moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and joined the Southern Center for Human Rights full-time. The center divided work by region and Stevenson was assigned to Alabama. In 1989 he was appointed to run the Alabama operation, a resource center and death-penalty defense organization that was funded by Congress. He had a center in the state capital - Montgomery, Alabama.

Equal Justice Initiative

When Congress eliminated funding for death-penalty defense for lower income people after Republicans gained control in the 1994 mid-term elections, Stevenson converted the center and founded the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. In 1995 he was a awarded a MacArthur grant and put all the money toward supporting the center. He guaranteed a defense of anyone in Alabama sentenced to the death penalty, as it was the only state that did not provide legal assistance to people on death row.

Stevenson has been particularly concerned about overly harsh sentencing of children convicted under the age of 18. The Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons (2005) that the death penalty was unconstitutional for persons convicted of crimes while under the age of 18. Stevenson worked to have the court's thinking about appropriate punishment broadened to related cases applying to children convicted under the age of 17.

EJI mounted a litigation campaign to gain review of cases in which convicted children were sentenced to life-without-parole, including in cases without homicide. In Miller v. Alabama (2012), the US Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision that mandatory sentences of life-without-parole for children 17 and under were unconstitutional; their decision affected statutes in 29 states. In 2016, the court ruled in Montgomery v. Louisiana that this decision had to be applied retroactively, potentially affecting the sentences of 2300 people nationwide who had been sentenced to life while still children.

By August 2016, EJI has saved 125 men from the death penalty. In addition, it has represented poor people, defended people on appeal and overturned wrongful convictions, and worked to alleviate bias in the criminal justice system.

Acknowledging slavery

The EJI offices are near the landing at the Alabama River where slaves were unloaded in the domestic slave trade; an equal distance away is Court Square, "one of the largest slave-auction sites in the country." Stevenson has noted that in downtown Montgomery, there were "dozens" of historic markers and numerous monuments related to Confederate history, but nothing acknowledging the history of slavery, on which the wealth of the South was based and for which it fought the Civil War. He proposed to the state and provided documentation to recognize three slavery sites with historic markers; the Alabama Department of Archives and History told him that it did not want to "sponsor the markers given the potential for controversy." Stevenson worked with an African-American history group to gain sponsorship for this project; they gained state approval for the three markers in 2013, and these have been installed in Montgomery.

Memorial for Peace and Justice

Stevenson has acquired six acres of former public housing land in Montgomery for the development of a new project, the Memorial for Peace and Justice, to commemorate the nearly 4,000 lynchings that took place in the South from 1877 to 1950. Many lynchings were conducted openly in county courthouse squares. Stevenson believes this history of extra-judicial lynchings by white mobs is closely associated with the subsequent high rate of death sentences imposed in Alabama and other southern states, and applied disproportionately to minority people. He also believes this history influences the bias against minorities as expressed in disproportionately high mass incarceration rates for them across the country.

He plans a related museum, From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Exhibits will include a slave warehouse near the entrance, as well as material on lynching, racial segregation, and mass incarceration since the late 20th century. Stevenson believes that the treatment of people of color under the criminal justice system is related to the history of slavery and later treatment of minorities in the South.

Author

Stevenson wrote the critically acclaimed memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, published in 2014 by Spiegel & Grau. It was selected by Time magazine as one of the "10 Best Books of Nonfiction" for 2014. It won the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction.

Speaker

Stevenson has carried out an active public speaking schedule, which he uses largely for fundraising for the work of EJI. His speech at TED2012 in Long Beach, California brought him a wide audience on the Internet. Following his presentation, attendees at the conference contributed more than $1 million to fund a campaign run by Stevenson to end the practice of placing convicted children to serve sentences in adult jails and prisons. His talk is available at "We need to talk about an injustice" on the TED website; by August 2016 it had been viewed by more than 3 million people.

Stevenson spoke at the University of Delaware graduation on May 28, 2016, where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for his contributions to society. He also spoke at the Williams College Commencement on June 5, 2016, where he received an honorary doctorate. On June 5, 2011, Stevenson was the commencement speaker for Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and was awarded the Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa for his many achievements in the pursuit of social justice and international human rights. He was also the commencement speaker at College of the Holy Cross on May 22, 2015, and at Wesleyan University on May 22, 2016.

In June 2017, Stevenson will deliver the 93rd Ware Lecture at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in New Orleans, Louisiana, joining the ranks of previous lecturers including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kurt Vonnegut.

Stevenson is featured in episode 45 of the podcast 'Crimina l' by Radiotopia from PRX. Host Phoebe Judge talked with Stevenson about his experiences during his 30 years spent working to get people off of death row, and about his take on the deserving of mercy.

Awards

1995 MacArthur Fellow

2000 Olof Palme Prize

2009 Gruber Prize for Justice

2011 Four Freedoms Award

2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction

2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction

2017 The Stowe Prize for Writing to Advance Social Justice

Publications

"Confronting Mass Imprisonment and Restoring Fairness to Collateral Review of Criminal Cases," 41 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 339 (2006)

"The Ultimate Authority on the Ultimate Punishment: The Requisite Role of the Jury in Capital Sentencing," 54 Ala. L. Rev. 1091 (2003)

"The Politics of Fear and Death: Successive Problems in Capital Federal Habeas Corpus Cases," 77 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 699 (2002)

"Cruel and Unusual: Sentencing 13-and 14-Year Old Children to Die in Prison" (2007)

Wikipedia

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

After Democrat Doug Jones won a stunning victory in Alabama’s special election to the U.S. Senate last month, lots of smart people whose work I read and follow, such as the New York Times’s Nate Cohn, declared that the battle for Senate control in 2018 was a “tossup.” Prediction markets largely concur; after Jones’s win, the betting odds of Democrats taking over the Senate shot up to about 45 percent.

I think this might be premature. Winning in Alabama certainly makes the Democrats’ path easier: They could now gain control of the Senate by retaining all of their own seats, plus picking up the Republican held-seats in purplish Nevada and Arizona. But they’re probably still the underdogs.

Democrats face a really tough Senate map

It’s not that I’m pessimistic about the Democrats’ overall position next year. To the contrary, I think most political observers had, until recently, been slow to recognize just how bad things had gotten for Republicans. But the Senate map is really tough for Democrats, with 26 Democratic seats in play next year (including a newly opened seat in Minnesota after Al Franken announced his intention to retire) as compared to just eight Republican ones. Moreover, five of the Democratic-held seats — the ones in West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Indiana — are in states that President Trump won by 18 percentage points or more.

Just how bad is this map for Democrats? It’s bad enough that it may be the worst Senate map that any party has faced ever, or at least since direct election of senators began in 1913. It’s bad enough that Democrats could conceivably gain (for example) 35 or 40 seats in the House … and yet not pick up the two seats they need in the Senate.

Don’t believe me? Check out the race-by-race ratings put forward by independent groups such as the Cook Political Report, Inside Elections1 and Sabato’s Crystal Ball. They suggest that Democrats are more likely to lose Senate seats next year than to gain them — and that while there’s a plausible path to a Democratic majority, it’s a fairly unlikely one.

These groups place their ratings into qualitative categories (e.g. “Likely Republican” and “Lean Democrat”) rather than assigning them probabilities. But it’s not too hard to translate from qualitative to quantitative. I went back and looked at the ratings that Cook, Sabato and Inside Elections had assigned to Senate races at about this point2 in the 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016 election cycles. About 95 percent of the races these groups rated as being “safe” were in fact won by the party they listed as the favorite (most of the exceptions were when an incumbent unexpectedly retired). The favorite won in about 85 percent of the races they rated as “likely,” and about 75 percent of the races they rated as “lean.”3 We can use these probabilities as guides to estimate the likelihood of Democrats winning each Senate race in 2018, averaging the ratings from Cook, Sabato and Inside Elections together:

How experts rate the Senate races

2018 Senate races by ratings and implied probability of a Democratic win

Rating State Incumbent Party Cook Inside Elections Sabato Probability of Dem. Win Mississippi Wicker R Safe R Safe R Safe R 5% Nebraska Fischer R Safe R Safe R Safe R 5 Utah — R Safe R Safe R Safe R 5 Wyoming Barrasso R Safe R Safe R Safe R 5 Texas Cruz R Safe R Safe R Likely R 8 Tennessee — R Tossup Likely R Likely R 23 Arizona — R Tossup Tossup Tossup 50 Indiana Donnelly D Tossup Tossup Tossup 50 Missouri McCaskill D Tossup Tossup Tossup 50 Nevada Heller R Tossup Tossup Tossup 50 West Virginia Manchin D Tossup Tossup Lean D 58 Florida Nelson D Lean D Tilt D Tossup 62 North Dakota Heitkamp D Lean D Tossup Lean D 67 Minnesota* — D Tossup Likely D Lean D 70 Montana Tester D Likely D Tilt D Lean D 73 Wisconsin Baldwin D Likely D Tilt D Lean D 73 Ohio Brown D Lean D Lean D Lean D 75 Pennsylvania Casey D Likely D Lean D Likely D 82 Maine King D† Lean D Safe D Likely D 85 Michigan Stabenow D Likely D Safe D Likely D 88 New Jersey Menendez D Likely D Safe D Likely D 88 Virginia Kaine D Safe D Safe D Likely D 92 California Feinstein D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Connecticut Murphy D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Delaware Carper D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Hawaii Hirono D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Maryland Cardin D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Massachusetts Warren D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Minnesota Klobuchar D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 New Mexico Heinrich D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 New York Gillibrand D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Rhode Island Whitehouse D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Vermont Sanders D† Safe D Safe D Safe D 95 Washington Cantwell D Safe D Safe D Safe D 95

* Special election

† King and Sanders are independents who caucus with the Democratic party.

If you add the probabilities for each race together, you’ll find that these ratings have Democrats losing an average of about three Senate seats next year. An optimistic Democrat might note that all the races their party needs to win control of the Senate — that is, all of their own seats, plus the Republican-held ones in Arizona and Nevada — are nevertheless listed as tossups or better for Democrats. But that doesn’t mean their overall chances of winning the Senate are 50-50. Unless Democrats unexpectedly put another seat, such as Tennessee, into play, they’d have to win all of the four tossups (Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada), plus a number of other races (such as West Virginia and Florida) where they’re listed only as marginal favorites.

How you model the Senate makes a big difference to Democrats’ odds

What are the chances of that? This is actually a tricky question because the outcomes in each race are correlated. (Failure to account for these sorts of correlations was a big reason that some models underrated Trump’s Electoral College chances last year.) If Trump’s approval rating declines even further by November, for instance, that could make the whole map bluer — so all of the races that currently look like tossups could be “lean Democrat” by then. Alternatively, strong economic growth later this year could make voters more inclined to keep Republicans in office – which could enable the GOP to win all of the tossup races.

These correlations make a huge difference when forecasting the fate of the Senate. We’ll launch our “official” FiveThirtyEight Senate forecasts later this year, once we have more polling in each race. (We don’t have much polling now, that’s why we’re using these ratings.) But I built a simulation program in which — unlike in a traditional Monte Carlo simulation where each race is assumed to be independent from the others — I can crank the correlations up or down as much as I want. If I assume that the races are totally uncorrelated — how the Democratic candidate does in Nevada has nothing to do with how the Democrat fares in Arizona — Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate are only about 1 percent, according to the simulation. If I instead assume the races are perfectly correlated — if you win one “tossup,” you win ‘em all — Democrats’ chances are 50 percent, by contrast.

But neither of those assumptions are realistic. Although it’s important to account for some correlation, Senate races are also a long way from being perfectly correlated. Sometimes the candidates can matter, as we saw with Jones and Roy Moore in Alabama. And the most competitive races this year are a somewhat eclectic mix of vulnerable Democratic incumbents (such as Missouri’s Claire McCaskill), vulnerable Republican incumbents (such as Nevada’s Dean Heller), and open seats (such as in Arizona).

A good rule-of-thumb for Senate races is that roughly half of the uncertainty stems from local factors and half comes from national factors. If I encode that assumption into the simulation, it comes up with a 22 percent probability of Democrats taking over the Senate based on the race ratings. That isn’t nothing, but it’s a long way removed from the even-steven battle that conventional wisdom now seems to assume.

Of course, this logic is a little bit circular. The only thing I’ve “proven” here — it’s also been demonstrated by other analysts such as Dean Strachan — is that there’s an incongruity between how people4 are looking at individual Senate races (let’s call this the “micro” view), and how they’re looking at the overall Senate picture (the “macro” view). But It could be that the macro view is right, and that the assessment of individual Senate races is off. Maybe Heller’s seat in Nevada should be thought of as “lean Democrat” or even “likely Democrat” rather than a tossup, for instance.

I’ll return to this question in a moment — but first, there’s one more slightly unpleasant complication.

More Senate seats could come open by November

The 34 races I listed in the chart above are not necessarily the only ones that will be contested next year. As was the case with Franken’s seat in Minnesota, other senators could unexpectedly retire, or they could pass away, leaving a vacancy that would be filled by special election. Bettors assessing Democrats’ overall Senate chances of winning the Senate are no doubt accounting for these possibilities, even if groups such as Sabato, Inside Elections and Cook are not.

Two seats involving ailing Republican senators could particularly affect the Senate calculus. One is Arizona, where Sen. John McCain has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer; he hasn’t yet announced any plans to retire, but Republicans are preparing for the possibility that he’ll end his term prematurely. The other is Mississippi, where Sen. Thad Cochran, age 80, is reportedly considering retirement after a series of medical complications.

Another way for Democrats to gain seats would be if a current Republican switched parties. Empirically, this happens fairly often after wave elections (two Democratic senators switched to the GOP after the 1994 Republican wave, and Republican Arlen Specter switched to Democrats after 2008). It also happens when control of the Senate is up for grabs (as when Jim Jeffords defected from Republicans to caucus with Democrats in 2001). The most likely Republicans to switch parties — based on their relatively high rate of disagreement with Trump and their cross-partisan appeal in their respective states — are probably Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.

So suppose we add the following contingencies to the simulation:

There’s a 50-50 chance of a second Senate race in Arizona. If such a race occurs, it rates as a tossup, just like the other Arizona race does (which is also an open seat since Sen. Jeff Flake is retiring).

There’s also a 50-50 chance of a second Senate race in Mississippi. If such a race occurs, it rates as “likely Republican” — slightly less certain for Republicans than the other Mississippi race, which features an incumbent (Sen. Roger Wicker).

There’s a 25 percent chance that Collins switches parties, conditional upon her vote either swinging the Senate to Democrats or Democrats already having won the Senate.5

And there’s a 10 percent chance that Murkowski does the same.

Include these possibilities, and the Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate improve to 29 percent, up from 22 percent before. So they help at the margin, but aren’t enough on their own to turn Senate control into a tossup.6

What a true Senate tossup would look like

As I mentioned, however, it’s possible that the macro view of the Senate is right in treating control as a 50-50 proposition — and the ratings of individual races are miscalibrated. As reliable as they usually are, ratings from groups such as Cook can sometimes be slow to account for the overall political environment, which currently seems to strongly favor Democrats.

Take Flake’s former seat in Arizona, for example. Cook, Sabato and Inside Elections all rate the race as a tossup. But there’s an argument that Democrats should be considered favorites there. In 2016 — a roughly neutral political year — Arizona voted for Trump by only about 4 percentage points. But as we gear up for 2018, the generic Congressional ballot currently favors Democrats by about 10 points, which would be enough to outweigh that. Plus, the GOP has some potentially problematic candidates in the state, such as Kelli Ward. You wouldn’t want to rate Democrats as especially heavy favorites, but it might be reasonable to describe Arizona as leaning Democrat rather than being a tossup.

Rather than nitpick the ratings in individual states, suppose we shift all of the races slightly toward Democrats. I programmed the simulation to keep adding to Democrats’ win probability in every race until their overall chances of winning the Senate reached 50 percent. (The adjustment7 is nonlinear: Races that were initially rated as tossups shift more than those where one party was considered almost certain to win.) Essentially, we’re working backward: If we insist that Senate control is a tossup, what would the ratings in individual races have to look like to justify that claim?

What it would take to make Senate control a tossup

2018 Senate races by original, ratings-based probability of a Democratic win vs. revised probability if overall Senate odds are 50-50

Probability of Dem. Win* State Incumbent Party Original Revised Alaska (possible party switch) Murkowski R — 6% Mississippi Wicker R 5% 11 Nebraska Fischer R 5 11 Utah Hatch R 5 11 Wyoming Barrasso R 5 11 Mississippi (possible special election) (Cochran) R — 14 Maine (possible party switch) Collins R — 14 Texas Cruz R 8 17 Arizona (possible special election) (McCain) R — 33 Tennessee — R 27 42 Arizona — R 50 67 Indiana Donnelly D 50 67 Missouri McCaskill D 50 67 Nevada Heller R 50 67 West Virginia Manchin D 58 74 Florida Nelson D 62 77 North Dakota Heitkamp D 67 81 Minnesota (special election) — D 70 83 Montana Tester D 73 85 Wisconsin Baldwin D 73 85 Ohio Brown D 75 87 Pennsylvania Casey D 82 91 Maine King D† 85 93 Michigan Stabenow D 88 95 New Jersey Menendez D 88 95 Virginia Kaine D 92 97 California Feinstein D 95 98 Connecticut Murphy D 95 98 Delaware Carper D 95 98 Hawaii Hirono D 95 98 Maryland Cardin D 95 98 Massachusetts Warren D 95 98 Minnesota Klobuchar D 95 98 New Mexico Heinrich D 95 98 New York Gillibrand D 95 98 Rhode Island Whitehouse D 95 98 Vermont Sanders D† 95 98 Washington Cantwell D 95 98

* King and Sanders are independents who caucus with the Democratic party.

† The original probabilities reflect race ratings from Cook Political Report, Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, translated into probabilities.

Revised probabilities adjust the original probabilities upward, such that Democrats overall chance of winning the Senate is 50-50.

There are several interesting things going on here:

The “tossups” aren’t really tossups. The four races that were originally rated as pure tossups — Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada — now rate as having a two-in-three chance of going for Democrats instead.

Republicans have fewer targets. Seemingly competitive Midwestern states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where there are potentially vulnerable Democratic incumbents, become real long-shots for Republicans.

And Democrats have more targets. The blue team has some realistic prospects of picking up Republican seats beyond their primary targets of Arizona and Nevada, with Tennessee or a second seat opening up in Arizona being the most likely possibilities.

So this is what a true 50-50 battle for the Senate would look like — but are these revised ratings realistic? You’d have to go through on a case-by-case basis. As I mentioned, for instance, I’d have no problem with treating Arizona as leaning Democratic. And the revised ratings for some of the Democratic incumbents in purple states, such as Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin and Pennsylvania Bob Casey, seem more realistic than the original ones to me; they shouldn’t be all that vulnerable in this sort of political climate. But I’m not sure I buy that Democrats have a 42 percent chance of a pickup in Tennessee, or that McCaskill is a two-to-one favorite in Missouri, where Republicans are fielding some strong opponents.

Personally, I’d probably split the difference between the macro and the micro views, and put Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate somewhere in the range of 35 to 40 percent. That’s a lot better for Democrats than it was before Alabama, and it’s higher than it probably “should” be given how favorable the Senate map is for Republicans. But it’s still a fairly steep hill to climb.

[pennsylvaniaprelawland-blog]

Response To Dangers of Underage Binge-Drinking Among Universities

By Emily Condon, University of Pennsylvania Class of 2021

September 23, 2019

It’s no secret that binge-drinking on college campuses, especially among underage drinkers, is pervasive and destructive. Binge-drinking is defined as having “5 or more drinks on a single occasion for men or 4 or more drinks on an occasion for women,” according to NIADA, the National Institute on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. As expressed in the media through newspapers, documentaries, and on social networking websites, excessive alcohol consumption isn’t only unhealthy for the person consuming the alcohol, but it also puts others at risk for accidental injury, detrimental decisions, and sexual assault. Below, we’ll take a look at some highly publicized cases of calamitous underage drinking and explore what school are doing to combat the issue.

In September 2016, the University of Pennsylvania off-campus fraternity names ‘OZ’ came under fire as a product of a party invitation email blast sent out to a number of Penn freshmen women. The email advised recipients to wear ‘something tight’ and encouraged the girls to act promiscuously through implication, as well as stating the intended service of alcohol to inevitably underage freshmen.

Upon receipt of this email, Penn students began to protest rape culture, plastering copies of this email throughout campus, along with the superimposed words, “THIS IS WHAT RAPE CULTURE LOOKS LIKE. WE ARE WATCHING.”

In response to issues like this one, and in an effort to keep students as safe as possible while partying on campus, Penn established a task force in February of 2017. The task force requires student groups, both affiliated and unaffiliated with the university, to register their events with the school’s office of Alcohol and other Drugs office (AOD). (VPUL, 2019) Once registered, third-party bartenders and bouncers are hired. The bartenders will only serve beer and wine at the event, and students are carded at the door, able to enter at 18-years-old, but only given an ‘of age’ wristband or hand stamp at 21-years old or over. If this policy isn’t followed, alcohol monitors or the Penn Police may approach the event and shut it down.

Northwest of the University of Pennsylvania at Penn State, drinking-related danger has plagued State College, PA. Following the well-known tragic fraternity hazing-related death of Timothy Piazza, which landed 3 affiliated men in prison, (Holcombe, 2019) the university outlines its guidelines of alcohol use and attempts to minimize future risk. Their policies state that alcohol is prohibited in all on-campus housing units, regardless of the possessor’s age. The Interfraternity Council also made the decision to contract with a third-party security company called St. Moritz to monitor parties, an entity present just minutes before Piazza fell down the fraternity’s stairs to clear the scene of the party. (Flanagan, 2017)

At Penn State, undergraduates must register all parties, and none of these parties may involve alcohol since it’s understood that most attendees at an undergraduate party will be underage.

Stanford University has implemented a policy which students colloquially dubbed ‘open door policy’ for the control of underage and binge-drinking and associated dangers on campus.

Stanford also recently dealt with a scandal related to excessive alcohol consumption with the assault and attempted rape of an intoxicated female student by student Brock Turner.

Stanford’s policy recognizes the fact that students will drink, and attempts to encourage them to do so responsibly. At Stanford, students must register parties, with deadlines of 3-30 days in advance depending on the type of party or event. Under no circumstances, even among graduate students all over the age of 21, may shots be served at a party. Undergraduate parties may only serve beer, wine, and other pre-packaged or pre-portioned alcoholic drinks, for example, wine coolers. (Stanford Office of Alcohol Policy and Education, 2019)

Stanford’s Office of Alcohol Policy and Education also outlines a number of prohibited behaviors related to partying. As stated, Stanford complies with federal law, prohibiting the consumption or service of alcohol by or to someone under the age of 21. Drinking games, hazing, and other activities that promote a high rate of alcohol consumption are not allowed. Additionally, all sober monitors must stay completely sober thought the event. (Stanford Office of Alcohol Policy and Education, 2019)

Stanford’s open door policy is similar to that of Washington University St. Louis. A Wash U. student interviewed for another article pertaining to the issue stated that, “‘The policy encourages freedom and trust between students and authorities.’” (Mariwala, 2015)

“Michigan’s Greek system promised to self-police,” reported the New York Times in an investigative piece pertaining to the issues of underage drinking. (NYT, 2016) The university has banned the sale of alcohol in and around the football stadium as a safety measure, as well as banning handles of hard liquor and kegs. Sober monitors much hold a certain ratio to other intoxicated guests at a party, and if any of these rules are broken, the university may intervene and students are subject to the implications of illegal activity. (NYT, 2016)

Another more hands-off measure used by universities such as Frostburg University involves social medial campaigning. The university has been involved in “sending regular emails and putting up posters for a campaign it calls "Reality Check." One says: “'Not Everyone's Doing It: 36 percent of FSU students reported they did not drink alcohol in the last 30 days.’" Another shows a young woman bent over a toilet, mouth open, with the caption, “'Glamorous, Isn't It?’” (Ludden, 2014)

Despite all of these various measures to help and encourage students to follow the law and lead healthier lives, the parties rage on, and risks to manage are inevitable.

In response to this reality, one constant among the schools listed above is the provision of detailed outlines of university and/or state enforced regulations related to medical amnesty.

Different schools involve this legal protection differently in conversation, but the bottom line is, medical amnesty removes a perceived barrier in calling for help when a student or their friend is intoxicated and demands medical attention. Students often feel concerned about legal

implications such as receiving a minor in possession charge if alerting emergency services about an intoxicated underage drinker or drug-user, and this policy removes that fear in an effort to protect students.

Stipulations to this law include potential legal implications for someone in possession of copious amounts of drugs, or as the University of Michigan’s University Health Service outlines,  the student is only legally protected “when the amount of the drug possessed is sufficient only for personal use.”

However, at the end of the day, this measure enables students to feel more comfortable and able to seek medical attention where necessary, and removing the concern of getting into legal trouble is a step that university and state officials alike believe will help promote healthier and safer campuses.

________________________________________________________________

All About Alcohol. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://studentaffairs.psu.edu/support-safety-conduct/student-conduct/students-and-organizations/all-about-alcohol

Bausinger, A. (2018, January 30). Responsible Action Protocol amendment gives Penn State students medical amnesty regardless of who calls police. Retrieved from https://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_a625f498-0535-11e8-997f-b35fb6703e52.html

Chaloupka, F. J., & Wechsler, H. (2007, July 2). BINGE DRINKING IN COLLEGE: THE IMPACT OF PRICE, AVAILABILITY, AND ALCOHOL CONTROL POLICIES. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1465-7287.1996.tb00638.x

Dastagir, A. E. (2019, September 4). Survivor in the Brock Turner rape case has revealed her identity. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/04/brock-turner-stanford-rape-case-chanel-miller-survivor-emily-doe/2207106001/

Digging Into the Defense: Details on Penn State Fraternity Death. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.erienewsnow.com/story/35402836/digging-into-the-defense-details-on-penn-state-fraternity-death

Fall Semester-A Time for Parents To Discuss the Risks of College

Drinking. (2019, August 19). Retrieved from https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/time-for-parents-discuss-risks-college-drinking

Flanagan, C. (2017, November 9). Death at a Penn State Fraternity. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/a-death-at-penn-state/540657/

Holcombe, M. (2019, April 3). 3 fraternity brothers sentenced to jail in Penn State hazing death. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/03/us/tim-piazza-fraternity-member-hazing-sentences/index.html

Ludden, J. (2014, September 16). Colleges Brainstorm Ways To Cut Back On Binge Drinking. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/09/16/347475250/colleges-brainstorm-ways-to-cut-back-on-binge-drinking

Mariwala, A. (2015, May 11). Enjoy responsibly: Alcohol policies at American universities. Retrieved from https://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/05/08/enjoy-responsibly-alcohol-policies-at-american-universities/

Medical Amnesty Policy. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.vpul.upenn.edu/alcohol/amnesty.php

Penn State Policies. (2017, August 7). Retrieved from https://policy.psu.edu/policies/ad18

Registration. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://alcohol.stanford.edu/party-planning/registration

Spinelli, D. (n.d.). Flyers cover campus with suggestive email, saying, 'This is what rape culture looks like'. Retrieved from https://www.thedp.com/article/2016/09/rape-culture-flyers

Task Force: Office of the Provost. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://provost.upenn.edu/task-force

The New York Times. (2016, October 29). No Kegs, No Liquor: College Crackdown Targets Drinking and Sexual Assault. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/us/college-crackdown-drinking-sexual-assault.html

University Health Service. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://uhs.umich.edu/medicalamnesty

[circlebeam4-blog]

Should We Be Afraid of the Mariner East Pipeline?

City

The ongoing battle over the project is taking place in the backyards of Chester and Delaware county residents, who live in fear of a catastrophe.

Exton’s Paula Brandl and the Mariner East Pipeline construction barricade cutting through her backyard. Photograph by Shira Yudkoff

It was dark outside, around 5 a.m., when the flames took over the sky. Neighbors described it like this: a loud hissing noise. A massive ball of fire. A jet, or a meteor, crashing into the earth. Night turning into day.

On September 10, 2018, a section of the Revolution Pipeline — which had begun carrying natural gas just a week earlier — leaked and ignited in rural Beaver County, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh. The rupture shot flames 150 feet into the air, destroying one house, collapsing several overhead power lines, and forcing the evacuation of nearly 50 residents.

Fortunately, no one was injured; the couple who lost their home had fled in the nick of time.

But for residents living along the thousands of miles of natural gas pipelines in Pennsylvania — second only to Texas as the nation’s largest producer of the fossil fuel and home to the newly booming, energy-rich Marcellus Shale region — the fire and the charred earth it left behind serve as a haunting reminder: Something like this could happen in our backyards.

That dread is perhaps nowhere more evident than 300 miles southeast of Beaver County, in the dense suburban neighborhoods west of Philadelphia, a city that energy industry leaders have, in the past decade, eyed as a global processing and trading hub. Here, tensions surrounding the cross-state Mariner East pipelines — a project much larger than Revolution and owned by the same parent company, Dallas-based Energy Transfer — are only intensifying.

The pipelines (Mariner East 1 and 2 and the not-yet-completed 2x) carry highly compressed natural gas liquids. Once they are fully operational along a 350-mile route from their Marcellus Shale source to a revitalized former oil refinery in Marcus Hook, they promise to be vastly lucrative for Energy Transfer — and for the state, which, the company boasts, could see an economic impact of more than $9 billion from the project. But since work began in February 2017, Mariner East has been plagued by nearly 100 state Department of Environmental Protection violations, multiple sinkholes, service shutdowns and construction chaos. Glaring gaps in state regulatory oversight have been exposed, and opposition has grown into significant pushback from neighbors and a bipartisan group of lawmakers who say Pennsylvania communities are at risk of — and unprepared for — a potential pipeline disaster.

Mariner East is headed for an inflection point: Construction could continue despite opponents’ pitched efforts, or officials could take steps to pause, end or remedy a project that’s been embattled since its inception. In the meantime, those at the heart of the Mariner East conflict zone live in fear of an incident like Beaver ­County’s — or worse.

•

In April, a fortress-like metal barricade was erected across the center of Paula Brandl’s quiet, grassy backyard in Exton, Chester County. The scene outside her kitchen window is almost dystopian. Brandl says land agents connected with Sunoco Pipeline LP, the Energy Transfer subsidiary that’s building the lines, told her the wall was installed as a noise barrier. For roughly two weeks after it went up, she says, she and her family members were “in shock.” Brandl contacted the agents and various state agencies to inquire about vibrations caused by the hidden construction as well as diesel exhaust in the air in and around her home, but she says no one she spoke with was helpful or informative.

“I have every right to know what is going on back there,” Brandl says at her dining room table one late-April day. “It’s just as if I don’t even own that land anymore.”

Energy Transfer is able to occupy Brandl’s backyard (and yards in 17 Pennsylvania counties) through what a recent New Yorker story termed a “legal loophole” linking the Mariner East project to the route of a 1930s pipeline that formerly transported heating oil. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, the main state agency tasked with overseeing oil and gas projects, has deemed the project a public utility, stressing that state code “recognizes the intrastate transportation by pipeline of petroleum products.” Doing so grants the pipelines right-of-way, which is typically reserved for utilities offering some sort of benefit to the general public, like schools or highways.

Energy Transfer spokesperson Lisa Dillinger says that putting additional pipelines into an existing right-of-way is a common practice that “helps to reduce our environmental footprint.” But the pipelines’ public utility status enrages Brandl and other residents, especially since a significant quantity of the product the lines carry is to be shipped overseas to make plastics.

“The PUC failed us,” Brandl says. “This is not a utility. This is not a gas line that’s serving the benefit of Pennsylvanians. And that’s basically the root of this entire issue.”

In Pennsylvania, there’s no state agency responsible for approving the routes of intrastate hazardous-liquid pipelines — nor does federal law require that oversight. David Hess, who served as Pennsylvania’s DEP secretary under Republican governors Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker from 2001 to 2003, says the lack of any such authority puts Pennsylvania “in a very disadvantageous position … because the pipeline route is critical. If the law was different, I don’t think you’d ever approve a route through populated areas like these, given the risks with some of these materials being carried.”

Dillinger says that Energy Transfer goes “above and beyond what is required to ensure the safety of our lines.” But it’s clear that the state agencies left to regulate the massive Mariner East project — the Pennsylvania DEP and the PUC — have an unprecedented situation on their hands, with what Hess calls “unanticipated impacts” in areas “overgrown with development.” Chief among those impacts are sinkholes that have opened in yards along the pipeline construction route in Chester County, twice exposing the buried pipe of the 1930s line (now repurposed as Mariner East 1) and prompting pipeline shutdowns to avert what the PUC called a potentially “catastrophic” risk to public safety.

The residents who owned those once-quaint yards — on Lisa Drive, just outside Exton — said they were terrified for their lives. Then, in April, Energy Transfer bought two of the homes, and the families moved out. Now, the properties sit eerily quiet and mostly empty, save for construction equipment and a small sign in one of the yards: notice: audio and video recording in progress. When I visited the area in early May, a man who identified himself as a relative of one of the former homeowners told me that in the neighborhood, “Everybody wants to get out.”

•

Paula Brandl and other residents who have endured the complications of hosting Mariner East construction on or near their properties — water contamination, spills of drilling mud, intimidating contractors — say those side effects pale in comparison to their biggest fear: a pipeline leak.

Natural gas liquids can rapidly change to an explosive gaseous state during a leak, and the gas can be ignited by sources as small as static discharge from using a cell phone, flicking a light switch or ringing a doorbell. Leaks, which can be caused by welding failures, material defects, pipeline corrosion, shifting land and other factors, have already happened along Mariner East 1 — three since 2014, though none resulted in an explosion. Energy Transfer’s Dillinger says the 88-year-old pipeline underwent “integrity testing and major upgrades” when it was repurposed for natural gas liquids service, and in April, two years after a high-profile leak in Berks County, the company said it would conduct a “remaining life study” of the line.

Energy Transfer’s safety record is, however, bleak in general. Between 2002 and the end of 2017, pipelines affiliated with the company across the country experienced a leak or an accident every 11 days on average, according to an analysis of federal pipeline data compiled by environmental advocacy organizations Greenpeace USA and Waterkeeper Alliance. In an evaluation by NPR affiliate StateImpact Pennsylvania, the same federal data showed that Sunoco Pipeline is responsible for the industry’s second-highest number of incidents reported to inspectors over the past 12 years.

“When it comes to number of accidents, Sunoco’s not just an outlier; they’re sort of an extreme outlier,” Eric Friedman, a Delaware County resident who lives steps from the Mariner East pipeline route, tells me. Friedman, a former airline pilot who has worked for the FAA since 2006, sees Mariner East through a risk-management lens. (“Everything we do in commercial aviation is based on risk,” he says.) He learned of the pipelines in 2013 — a year after buying his home in an affluent Glen Mills ­neighborhood — and has been researching the project ever since. He’s in regular contact with the offices of lawmakers like U.S. Rep Mary Gay Scanlon and Chester County State Senator Andy Dinniman — the politician widely considered to be the pipelines’ most vocal opponent — and he’s one of the leaders of a nonpartisan residents group called the Middletown Coalition for Community Safety. In November 2018, seven residents of Chester and Delaware counties filed a complaint with the PUC against Sunoco Pipeline LP, alleging that the subsidiary hasn’t provided the public with a sufficient emergency notification system or management plan in the event of a pipeline-related disaster. The petitioners (nicknamed by residents the “Safety 7”) argue that as a public utility operator, Sunoco is tasked by federal regulations enforced by the PUC with providing an emergency-preparedness plan for potential disasters, like a possible leak along the Mariner East route. The failure to release a satisfactory plan, they say, places residents in the pipelines’ blast zone “at imminent risk of catastrophic and irreparable loss, including loss of life, serious injury to life, and damage to their homes and property.”

Energy Transfer has disputed the residents’ claims, saying that its emergency-response professionals “work and train with local first responders” and that it has shared a written public-education program specific to the area with emergency-response professionals along the line. Still, residents say the company hasn’t sufficiently involved the public in its preventative plans; the complaint is scheduled for hearings before an administrative law judge in July.

Meanwhile, the PUC has said it won’t release information about the potential impact of a leak or an explosion for several reasons, including that the state’s Right to Know law prohibits the disclosure of records that are “reasonably likely to jeopardize or threaten public safety.” Sharing the hazard assessments, the PUC argues, could compromise pipeline security by revealing information “which could clearly be used by a terrorist to plan an attack … to cause the greatest possible harm and mass destruction to the public living near such facilities.”

Brandl and other residents stress that living next to a “mass destruction” target is terrifying, with or without a disaster plan. To make matters worse, a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found major weaknesses in how the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration — which is responsible for addressing terrorism risks along the nation’s 2.7 million miles of oil and gas pipelines — manages its pipeline security efforts.

“I don’t think I’d be living 25 feet away from that pipeline,” Hess, the former DEP secretary, says. “But again, the question is, why was someone allowed to live within 25 feet of this pipeline in the first place?”

•

In December, Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan announced a criminal investigation into conduct related to the Mariner East project, saying that potential charges against individual Energy Transfer employees or corporate officers could include causing or risking a catastrophe, criminal mischief and environmental crimes. More recently, Delaware County DA Katayoun Copeland and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro launched a joint investigation into Sunoco Pipeline LP and Energy Transfer over allegations of criminal misconduct related to the project, with Copeland stating that there “is no question that the pipeline poses certain concerns and risks to our residents.” (At press time, both investigations were ongoing.) Energy Transfer’s Dillinger says that the company remains “confident that we have not acted to violate any criminal laws in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and are committed to aggressively defending ourselves.”

After years of pressure, residents might finally be getting through to the state. At a Pennsylvania Senate committee meeting in June 2018 — before, even, a number of critical developments regarding Mariner East — former Republican State Senator Don White of Indiana County made a surprising statement: If issues raised at the committee’s meetings regarding pipeline safety consistently involve one project — referring to Mariner East — then “we have the ability in this state to find a way to deal with this company and put them out of business.”

David Hess, the former Republican DEP secretary — he was also executive director of the state Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee in the ’90s — says that for a “Republican senator to say that is astounding … [it] really underscores the problems this company is generating.”

As frustration and fear about Mariner East spread to constituents in red and blue districts alike, lawmakers who are typically supportive of the oil and gas industry (like north-central Pennsylvania State Senator Gene Yaw) are voicing concern. White’s proposition poses a question that residents are forcing officials — particularly Governor Tom Wolf, who has positioned himself as an ally to environmentalists and residents but has received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from oil and gas industry ­affiliates — to consider: How should they deal with the Mariner East pipelines?

Several months after the Revolution Pipeline incident in Beaver County, Wolf released a statement calling on state lawmakers to “address gaps in existing law which have tied the hands of the executive and independent agencies charged with protecting public health, safety and the environment.” His suggestions included giving the PUC authority over the routing of intrastate pipelines, ordering companies to work with local emergency coordinators, and requiring the installation of remote shutoff valves to contain leaks. But the GOP-dominated legislature has yet to move any bills that would allow for those reforms. And none of that changes the fact that Mariner East has been unfolding on Wolf’s watch. The Governor has yet to visit Delaware or Chester counties to speak firsthand with residents living near the pipelines about their experiences. (Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman visited before the 2018 primary; a spokesman for Wolf’s office said the Governor has met with residents and lawmakers about the project in Harrisburg.) Constituents say Wolf is simply not doing enough to prevent a potential disaster. Whether his administration will adopt a firmer stance toward Mariner East — as residents and local lawmakers have requested — remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, the project continues to highlight the limitations of both the DEP and the PUC. After all, there were warning signs before the Beaver County leak, which Energy Transfer has said resulted from a landslide that followed heavy rains. (Both the company and the PUC are still investigating the incident.) The DEP had fined Energy Transfer three months before the Revolution Pipeline explosion for failing to mitigate erosion on a hillside about a mile from the site; the DEP says that at the time, it was “unaware of the issues associated with the blast site.” Critics have also questioned the agency’s decision to allow Sunoco Pipeline to use relatively new and potentially disruptive drilling methods that geologists say may have increased the risk of sinkholes along Lisa Drive in Chester County. The PUC and state DEP have penalized Energy Transfer for many of the company’s missteps, at times (and increasingly) seriously. Revolution Pipeline remains out of service, and since February, the DEP has suspended all Energy Transfer permit applications (including for Mariner East) until the company reaches compliance in Beaver County. To Hess, the agencies are “working in the best way they can.” But, he argues, lawmakers need to consider more stringent regulation, especially of pipeline routes.

The question for residents is whether officials or Energy Transfer will act before an emergency. Until then, Eric Friedman says, they’ll continue to feel unprotected.

“I think at some level, the most important function of government is to reasonably provide for the public’s safety,” he says. “And how can you have a project like this, that could kill hundreds or thousands of people in the worst-case scenario, and hope for the best and not plan for the worst?”

Published as “What Lies Beneath” in the July 2019 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Source: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/07/06/mariner-east-pipeline-sunoco-pennsylvania/

[sallysklar]

Gadfly on the Wall Blog: I Assign My Students Homework Despite Scant Research It Does Any Good

Gadfly on the Wall Blog: I Assign My Students Homework Despite Scant Research It Does Any Good

In academic circles the debate over homework rages on.

Does it actually help students learn or does it just cause undue stress and frustration for children and parents?

As a teacher and a parent, I see both sides of the issue.

In class, I assign my students homework every week – Monday through Thursday. Never on the weekends.

My daughter’s teacher does the same. So at home, I’m on the receiving end, spending hours with my little munchkin helping her get through mountains of assignments for her classes the next day.

Perhaps this is what they mean by the proverb – you reap what you sow. Except my daughter isn’t doing the homework I assigned. She isn’t in my class and we don’t even live in the district where I teach.

But it sometimes does feel like payback plodding through seemingly endless elementary worksheets, spelling words and vocabulary.

After a while, even I begin to question whether any of this junk does any good.

As a teacher, I know the research on the subject provides slim support at best.

In fact, the closest we have ever come to an answer is a reformulation of the question.

It really comes down to a matter of causality – a chicken and the egg conundrum with a side of sharpened pencil and crumpled paper.

If we look really hard, we can find a correlation between students who do their homework and those who get good grades.

The problem is we can’t PROVE it’s the homework that’s causing the grades.

It could just be that kids who excel academically also happen to do their homework. If we removed the homework, these kids might still get good grades.

So which comes first – the homework or the grades?

There has been surprisingly little research that goes this deep. And almost all of it is anecdotal.

Even the investigations that found a correlation did so in tight parameters – only in secondary grades and usually just for math.

Some wealthy districts have even reduced the amount of homework without seeing a subsequent drop in learning.

But nothing has been tested across socioeconomic divides or with any consistency and very little has been proven definitively.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no consensus on the matter.

Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the National Parent Teacher Association (NPTA) suggest educators assign no more than a standard of “10 minutes of homework per grade level” per night.

In other words, a first grader should have no more than 10 minutes of homework on a given evening, a second grader no more than 20 minutes, etc.

However, it appears that students – especially in the primary grades – are getting more work than these recommended maximums.

A 2015 study published in The American Journal of Family Therapy surveyed more than 1,100 Rhode Island parents with school age children.

Researchers found that first and second graders received 28 and 29 minutes of homework per night – almost double the recommended maximums. Even more shocking, Kindergarteners – who according to the guideline should receive no homework at all – actually were assigned an average of 25 minutes per night.

That’s a lot of extra time sitting and slogging through practice problems instead of spending time with friends or family.

Though I live in western Pennsylvania, this study is certainly consistent with what I see in my own home. My daughter is in 4th grade but has been assigned between 30 minutes and two hours of homework almost every weekday since she was in Kindergarten.

It’s one of the reasons I try to abide by the guidelines religiously in my own classroom. I give about an hours worth of homework every week – 15 minutes per day for four days. If you add in cumulative assignments like book reports, that number may go up slightly but not beyond the recommended maximums.

I teach 8th graders, so they should not be receiving more than 80 minutes of homework a night. If the teachers in the other three core classes give the same amount of homework as I do, we’d still be below the maximum.

I’m well aware that the consequences of giving too much homework can be severe.

A 2014 Stanford study published in the Journal of Experimental Education found that giving too much homework can have extremely damaging effects on children.

Still this isn’t exactly hard science.

The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California neighborhoods. They also used open-ended answers to gauge the students’ views on homework.

They concluded that too much homework was associated with greater stress, reductions in health, and less quality time with friends and family.

So where does that leave us?

We have anecdotal evidence that excessive homework is harmful. And limited evidence that homework may increase academic outcomes in the higher grades in math.

Frankly, if that was all I had to go on, I would never assign another piece of homework ever again.

But I’m a classroom teacher. I don’t have to rely solely on psychological and sociological studies. Everyday in school is an opportunity for action research.

My classroom is a laboratory. I am a scientist. Nearly every decision I make is based on empiricism, hypothesis and testing the results.

Maybe X will help students understand Y – that sort of thing.

This applies to homework, too.

I’ve had more than 15 years to test what works with my students. I’m not saying my results would necessarily be reproducible everywhere, but they’re at least as scientific as the body of research we have on homework. In fact, within these parameters they’re even more rigorous.

So why do I give homework?

For several reasons:

1)  It prepares students for the higher grades.

Most of my career has been spent in the middle school teaching 7th and 8th grade. In my district, high school teachers give a lot of homework. I need my students to get used to that rhythm – homework being assigned and handed in – so that they’ll have a chance at being successful in the upper secondary grades. Too many students go no further academically than 9th grade. Giving homework is my way to help provide the skills necessary to avoid that pitfall.

However, this isn’t a sufficient reason to give homework all by itself. If high school teachers stopped assigning it – and maybe they should if we have no further reason to do so – then I’d have no reason to assign it either.

2)  It makes kids responsible.

There’s something to be said for getting kids used to deadlines. You need to know what work you’re responsible for turning in, getting it done on your own and then handing it in on time. This is an important skill that I won’t apologize for reinforcing. I’m well aware that some students have extended support systems at home that can help them get their assignments done and done correctly, but I design the work so that even if they aren’t so privileged, it should be easily accessible on an individual level. Plus I’m available, myself, as a resource if necessary.

3)  It’s good practice.

In school, we learn. At home, we practice. That pattern is necessary to reinforce almost any skill acquisition. I know it’s trendy to flip the classroom a la Khan Academy with learning done through videos watched on-line at home and practice done in school. But when Internet access in not guaranteed, and home environments often are the least stable places in my students’ lives, it makes little sense to try to move the most essential part of the lesson outside of the classroom. After all, it’s easier to find a place to do some low tech practice than it is to find space, silence and infrastructure for high tech learning.

Don’t get me wrong. We practice in school, too. But there’s only so many hours in the school day. I use homework in my language arts classes for a few select things: increased vocabulary, word manipulation, grammar, self-selected reading and the ability to do work on your own. I think it’s important for my students to increase their vocabularies. Having kids read a self-selected book (both inside and outside of class) helps do that. It’s also a benefit to be able to play with words and language, find words in a puzzle, recognize synonyms and antonyms, etc. Grammar may not be essential, but a rough knowledge of it is certainly useful to increase recognition of context clues and better writing skills. Finally, some students benefit from the simple opportunity to do an assignment by themselves without an adult or even a peer looking over their shoulder.

That being said, I think it is important that the homework I give be seen as something students can achieve.

I’ve had numerous co-workers tell me they don’t assign homework for the simple reason that their students won’t do it.

This isn’t a big problem in my class. Almost all of my students do the homework. Why? Because we go over it and they know it’s something they can do without too much difficulty.

I scaffold assignments building the difficulty progressively as we proceed through the year (or years). I make myself available for extra help. I accept late work (with a penalty).

And most of all – I stress that I’m not expecting anyone to be a genius. I’m looking for hard work.

I tell my students explicitly that anyone who puts in their best effort will pass my class – probably with a B or an A. And that’s exactly what happens.

Homework is a part of that equation. It demonstrates effort. And effort is the first step (the key, in fact) to accomplishment.

Do students complain about the homework?

Sure! They’re children!

I’d probably complain, too, if I were them. No one really wants to be given extra work to do. But it’s all part of the pattern of my classroom.

Students know what to expect and how to meet those expectations.

None of this makes me a super teacher. It certainly doesn’t put me on anyone’s cutting edge.

I’m just doing what educators have done for decades. I’m attempting to use best practices in my classroom with a full knowledge of the academic research and the pitfalls ahead.

I may assign homework, but I made sure to do my own before coming to that decision.

elaine March 8, 2019

Source

Gadfly on the Wall Blog

Gadfly on the Wall Blog: I Assign My Students Homework Despite Scant Research It Does Any Good published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

[foxvslynch]

Fox Vs. Eraserhead

“What’s the strangest thing anyone has ever said to you about Eraserhead?

I like to have people be able to form their own opinion as to what it means and have their own ideas about things. But at the same time, no one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the film the way I see it. The interpretation of what it’s all about has never been my interpretation.”

From Vulture.com’s interview with David Lynch, September 2014.

There you have it. If you are searching for a ‘correct’ interpretation or analysis of David Lynch’s 1977 debut Eraserhead, you have come to the wrong place. Every place you could conceivably go is also wrong because, according to Lynch, no one has ever read Eraserhead like he does. In this write up, and in all the write ups to come, I do not ever want to claim I have gotten anywhere close to the ‘correct’ interpretations. However, I do want to write about the images Lynch presents, and where they lead me.

Image is the perfect jumping-off point to discuss this film. David Lynch’s formal training as a visual artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Visual Art is oft-cited as a means of contextualizing the focus of his filmmaking. Eraserhead is ground-zero for David Lynch the painter creating David Lynch the filmmaker. The first thing I always notice when I watch Eraserhead is how consciously composed every frame of the film is. To the extent that this film has any clear precedent in filmmaking, it is reminiscent of very early impressionistic and experimental films of the early twentieth century. However, where those films necessarily lack a degree of self-consciousness or experience, Eraserhead uses the canvas of black and white film expertly. The film is deep and rich and grungy. Lynch’s keen interest in two-dimensional projection as his canvas always shines through. Frankly, Eraserhead can be enjoyed simply as an exercise in careful, beautiful framing and cinematography.

However, most people (including yours truly) do not go to the movies simply to marvel at the visual ingenuity of directors. That era of filmmaking and viewing died long before we, or even Lynch, were alive. We want to see images on the big screen that, in some way, speak to us about our own lives. Eraserhead on its’ face may confound that demand. It’s mysterious, and weird, and single-minded in a direction that we aren’t privy to. In my viewing of Eraserhead I’ve isolated quite a few interesting themes worth tugging on and stretching on which will make up the focus of this write-up.

Eraserhead’s life begins at ejection. Specifically, the oral ejection of a horrific sperm-worm piloted by a barnacled man inside of a planet. This film is steeped in bodily violation. Henry’s nightmare gives a crash-course in the sort of horror Eraserhead specializes in. It is reminiscent of HR Giger’s work in Alien, but is even bulkier and more unreal.. Many of the creature effects in this film are either physical puppets or stop-motion animated. Escaping Henry’s dreams into the ‘real world’ (more on that later) gives us an understanding of the environment that produces these nightmares.

I often end up viewing Eraserhead as being about adolescence, and the ways that children have to try on the clothes of adulthood in preparation for the real thing. The sequence of Henry walking home with his sack of nondescript groceries provide tons of fodder for this interpretation. It’s worth re-watching this scene as if it were film of a child making their way home from school in typical suburbia. We can observe the common obstacles like mounds of dirt and thick mud; it’s not a stretch to imagine the sack as reminiscent of a backpack or a lunch sack. Another point for this interpretation is his ritual of checking the mail cubby. I can almost imagine Henry’s dejection every time he gets no mail. Henry’s extreme vulnerability is central to all of his scenes outside of his apartment. The world dwarfs him, it is cruel and industrial and uncaring, he has to establish a single route home just to exert some sense of stability and control (as evidenced by his very deliberate mound traversal). This manufactured comfort will be contrasted during his awkward visit to Mary X’s house.

Viewing Henry as somehow adolescent or childish, we can see many references to common childhood emotions in the film. Walking down his apartment hallway, he is stopped by his enticing neighbor (Judith Anna Roberts). Henry is obviously intimidated and confused by his own intimidation in the face of a confident adul, and he escapes the conversation with as few words as possible. This disparity or outclassing between Henry and the world of adults is another thread I’ve found particularly interesting.

It’s worth making a note about the physical design of the lived-in spaces of this world. The most important space in the film is Henry’s apartment, and it’s incredibly dour and depressing. His attempts at sprucing up the place with plants go as far as piles of dirt with twigs stuck in them. He has virtually no real belongings. And the sound. Like most spaces in this world it is permeated by a constant vaguely industrial whirl and drone. To cover it up, Henry plays a record of atonal carnival music, but that only makes the aural assault even more troubling. An underlying aspect of Eraserhead is the results of industry on society. The rooms we see feel absolutely barren and devoid of what we would recognize as the human element. How do people get used to this? Is that a normal function of becoming a fully-realized human?

Eraserhead is often interpreted as a film about the fear of fatherhood. I see a lot of merit in this analysis. Henry is invited to dinner at the home of his on-again off-again girlfriend, Mary X (though, tellingly, this invitation is conveyed by someone much smokier and more seductive). His trek to her house is about as perilous as his walk home from the grocery store: the streets are now dark and muddled, exposed piping belches steam, dogs yelp in the distance, vines and semi-trees are growing up the exterior of the X household.

Before we get to the meat of the dinner scene (no pun intended), let’s circle back around to the notion of dreams. As I mentioned before, Lynch takes a peculiar approach to the canvas of cinema. The observation is often made that film is essentially a mass hallucination or dream, yet, many mainstream filmmakers want to avoid the reality of how film is consumed as much as possible. The goal of set and sound design, acting, editing, and visual effects in many ‘standard’ films is to convince viewers that they are experiencing a version of reality, as opposed to watching a series of moving pictures projected on a screen. We will come to some examples later in Lynch’s canon where he plays with the idea of verisimilitude and what it means to trick an audience into believing in the unreal, but you have to remember that Lynch is always aware of the façade and is often either counting on you to forget or remember it. It is seductive to imagine Eraserhead as operating on two separate layers of reality; Henry’s dreamscapes and the dreamscapes presented as Henry’s reality (ostensibly). However, do not feel restrained by this delineation at all. This is a free-for-all, and you are always watching a dream.

The whole dinner scene (including the lengthy preamble) is wonderful and confounding. This could be its’ own essay, where we dissect (pun intended?) the dense relationships and symbolism on display. However, since this write-up isn’t meant to be a play-by-play, I’ll stick to my two favorite elements: man-made chickens, and Henry and Mary’s sex life.

The chickens are a fascinating piece of symbolism, in part because they may be the only time a character seems to note, out loud, the odd state of their world (with the possible exception of Bill on the subject of plumbing – people think pipes grow in their houses). The chickens are very explicitly stated to be the result of human genetic muddling. Bill believes them to be just like regular chickens, but once one starts writhing and bleeding on the plate, we are forced to either wonder about what chickens are like in this universe, or consider that perhaps we are not dealing with people who are fully there. There are so many things you can take from the chicken-carving scene and analyze, but I’m going to stick with the physical act. Carving a bird at a family gathering is a classic signifier of masculinity and adulthood in Western culture, hell, James Joyce wrote about it in The Dead. However, in Eraserhead, this mode of human existence, like music and agriculture, is also perverted and horrifying. It is drained of all it’s commonness and played fully for horror.

Is becoming an adult an exercise in desensitization? Is becoming a man, specifically? This dinner scene raises that question. We’ll get back to it. After the aborted dinner, the real point of this whole play comes out – “Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse?”

This entire evening, Henry has had to try on the clothes of adulthood. He’s been asked about his vocation (he’s on vacation, a very adolescent dodge that Mary’s mother does not waste time accommodating), he’s been asked to carve the chicken, and after dinner he is asked directly if he has been having sex with Mary. Henry cannot answer this forward question, just as he can’t handle the smoky siren next door. He might be having sex, but he is not even close to being in a place where he can understand it, or speak about it. In fact, as we have seen, his nights are haunted by immensely sexual imagery. Henry’s attempts at adulthood have been markedly unsuccessful so far, but he doesn’t have much time to get with the program – there’s a baby, and even in Eraserhead babies need fathers.

At this moment, I’m going to follow the somewhat obtuse structure of Eraserhead, and let myself off the hook for annotating every scene, and get into some broader discussions of the themes I’ve detected in the film.

Fatherhood

Henry and Mary’s new infant is not human, even granting that sometimes babies are hardly human. It is small and reptillian. It rejects food, and very quickly contracts sores reminiscent of the barnacles on the face of the man in the planet from the beginning of the film. In a sense, this is the most hyper-charged way of talking about an issue that is common but not very popular: what if you have a responsibility to a baby that you did not want and cannot bond with?

Henry and Mary are neglectful parents to their quasi-baby. Mary ghosts Henry within days. Henry is not perturbed by the incessant crying of the creature, but it drives Mary crazy. This is a playful use and inversion of the instant perfect mom. Mary’s motherly instincts have not kicked in, she isn’t upset that the creature is crying because crying indicates some distress, she’s upset because it is annoying and robs her of her sleep. She does seem to try her best for a short time, but she’s paired with a man-child (a scene I’d like to draw attention to is when he arrives home on what seems to be the first day and lays lengthwise across the bed. It’s classically adolescent.) But within a night, she is gone, not to be seen in the *real* world again.

Henry also doesn’t find much in fatherhood to latch onto. When the baby becomes sick, he gets a radiator for it, but his concern is mostly centered on the fact that it would look bad if the infant died or got sick under his care, especially after an argument with his wife. Henry cannot accept his responsibility, in part because he cannot actually imagine this creature as having any meaningful relation to him, or even to the concept of a real child. The woman in the radiator suggestively points to filicide as a real option for Henry as she stomps on sperm worms. He further abdicates responsibility in the related dream where he pulls worms out of his wife, seemingly shifting the blame away from Henry’s troublesome sperm.

The real moment of Henry’s undoing comes with his affair with the woman next door. In an unbelievably intense scene, Henry is immediately seduced and (in a sense) liberated. Finally, we see Henry as a sexual entity, as he tries (in an outrageously symbolic manner) to keep his monstrous baby silent (though, in a telling moment that points to this being a dream of another sort, his neighbor apparently cannot retain focus on the infant for too long in the heat of Henry’s newfound prowess).

Henry’s lengthy post-coital dreams take him on a whirlwind psychic tour. He encounters the lady in the radiator again, is decapitated, his head is replaced with a leering sperm worm, and so on. There’s a lot to read into all of this. Henry’s head’s new use as an apparatus of his industrial world, the old man lying in the dusty street feebly watching a child collecting his head. All of it is dense and mystical and deserves another adjoining essay, which I haven’t written. Were these dreams about heaven, hell, suicide, guilt? I don’t have the answers, and again, I find the questions themselves more interesting.\

Is Adulthood Just Desensitization?

          I briefly mentioned the sound design in Henry’s apartment, and I feel guilty that I don’t have the expertise on audio production to give this element of the film the gravity it deserves. Sound is so important to Eraserhead. The mixture of foley work and the otherworldly (though not entirely unfamiliar) industrial droning is iconic. Desensitization or failure to desensitize to sound is an important element of Eraserhead.. Henry has to put on a faded record to try and escape the constant drone of his apartment. Mary X cannot deal with the sonic stress of her crying creature/baby. Henry has to gag the creature to not alert his neighbor to its’ presence. The proliferation of unpleasant sound in this world is fundemental to its’ construction, and it seems like a big part of existing in the world of Eraserhead is simply dealing with intrusive sound.

          Another aspect of desensitization in this film is Henry’s apparent sexual awakening. I’ve struggled a little in my interpretation of what the film is trying to say about sexual maturity. Henry, despite the construction of the story and the fact that he got a woman pregnant, has an extremely virginal outlook at the start of the film. Remember back to how he describes his outings with Mary X “why don’t you come around anymore?” and his dodginess when faced with Mary’s mother and her frank questioning. Henry seems marginally more comfortable in making sexual advances by the end of the film, but it also seems to be a wellspring of guilt and fear for him. His desires, rather than being healthily realized either by Mary X or his neighbor, instead seem to be made manifest as a terrifying, spermic creature.

New watchers of David Lynch should get ready for lots of confusing depictions of sex and gender in general. Lynch can don the clothes of a turn of the century white American man or a bohemian, depending on what sort of imagery he chooses to create. I think it’s more helpful to simply ask the question - what is Eraserhead saying about Henry’s growing knowledge and desire for sex?

A third type of desensitization present in Eraserhead is related to the lived-in environment. I touched on before how unflattering and unkempt Henry’s apartment is, but we should also retain sight of the fact that, well, David Lynch is working with late mid-century Philadelphia as his canvas. He seems to delight in the factory town in a way that I cannot fully understand, but if you read interviews with him about Eraserhead, he states that he loves the universe they created for the film and would live in it if he could. He’s an industrialist. But it’s also clear that these characters are not made whole by their environment. No one seems worried that all their plants die, and that all their music is atonal and garish This desensitization to an abjectly gross living situation isn’t an active process in the film- Henry never seems to be that upset by the shabbiness of his apartment, the concrete caverns of his apartment building, or the dead factories of his city. But we, as viewers, not accustomed to it, do have to take note of the circumstances, and eventually we come to internalize them as well. People are moulded by their environment, and Eraserhead wants to see what shapes they can take. 

Adolescence

          To wrap up my analysis, I want to think a little bit about the ending of the film. I come to it with a simple question: what direction is Henry going?

          I’ve made previous mention to many instances of Henry’s evident childishness and naivete, but I perhaps haven’t been explicit enough.

          I consider Henry’s sexual encounter with his neighbor to be almost purely adolescent fantasy (which isn’t to make a statement on it’s level of truth in the layered structure of this film, it seems to reside on the same layer as any other concrete event in the film, which is to say, it’s one layer down from planet man, and half a layer down from Henry’s head being used to make erasers, but also my layered structure is also completely just my own invented heuristic). My statements on the levels of narrative in this film are almost certainly undercooked, but I don’t necessarily think that we are meant to ever get any further than we want to on the question of what is real).

           Adolescent impressions of sexuality are often eclipsed by real experiences later on, but in this scene the moments feel very raw and expectant. They are the impressions sustained by a preceding lifetime of unexperience. Every word in this scene hangs heavy. It’s incredible straight male wish fulfillment, and an intensely frank depiction of what children imagine sex to be: enticing and cosmically terrifying. What are we to see in this encounter? It seems like it is a source, or reincarnation, of guilt that Henry has created in the past and cannot escape, an interpretation that is bolstered by the violent imagery that follows as a consequence, and the fact that the two characters literally sink into a pool of goo. 

Also, as a forward-looking note, this is not the last time Lynch creates impossible sexual encounters that feel positively inescapable. It’s one of the things that really draws me to his work.

          But does all this - change Henry? Does it change us? What, by observing his dreams, are we meant to understand about him? I have impressions, but they are not concrete enough to try and write out. I consider the last twenty-five-ish minutes of Eraserhead to be a true litmus test. How they make you feel, what worlds they conjure and what possibilities are included and excluded in them is entirely personal. Frankly, writing about Eraserhead is somewhat quixotic because the film succeeds in a realm beyond words. There’s a reason telling someone else about your dream is so boring, after all.

So there we go! That’s the first post in my series. I cannot believe I’m going to write one of these every week for the next few months, but it’s immensely exciting and a new type of challenge. If you don’t like my take, or if you have your own, comment it. If you like this project and are excited for more, I’d really appreciate you subscribing or sharing this post!

Next week: The Elephant Man! 

[optometrist0]

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[torixus]

Unveiling the Real Zombies

See what the Real Zombies Are

Different types of Zombies /torixus

Portraying Characters of Zombies have gain weight in popular entertainment setting, which features in many written Notes, Movies and Events, including the Halloween Season. Portraying the zombiism those it mean that they really Exist?. Zombie is define by many to be a walking Dead.. The Undead dead as many think of it. Torixus Media Navigate through the web to bring to you the actual cases of zombification The word zombie — originally spelled as zombi — first came into the English language in the 1800s, when poet Robert Southey mentioned it in his History of Brazil. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word comes from the Louisiana Creole or Haitian Creole word zonbi, and it is akin to the Kimbundu term nzúmbe, which means ghost. The word refers to creatures from Haitian folklore that, at its origin, was little more than the ghosts from Western folklore. The General conclusion of all this definition is that, Zombie refers to someone that is rendered mindless by a witch doctor, entering a death-like state while still animated, and thus becoming the witch doctor's slave. Many People in Nigerians, especially  Children Igbo use the word "Zombie" on someone they hate his/her character having labelled the person to be  Sluggish, ugly and not suppose to relate with Normal People. The Question being asked is if Zombies are actually existing here in earth, people want to know what zombies are really, what they represent and how can a being become one if they really exist. Torixus Media surf the Net and have a concluding categories of Zombie Natur Ranging from Ants to Human Kind of Zombie according to MedicalNewstoday 1. Zombie ants

Ophiocordyceps is a genus of fungi that has more than 200 species, and mycologists are still counting. Many species of fungi can be dangerous, often because they are toxic to animals, but there is one thing in particular that makes Ophiocordyceps especially frightening. Carpenter ants taken over by parasitic fungi give in to their attackers and 'lose their minds.' These species of fungus "target" and infect various insects through their spores. After infection takes place, the parasitic fungus takes control of the insect's mind, altering its behavior to make the propagation of fungal spores more likely. Ophiocordyceps "feed" on the insects they attach to, growing into and out of their bodies until the insects die. One of these species, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis sensu lato, specifically infects, controls, and kills carpenter ants (Camponotus castaneus), native to North America. When Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infect carpenter ants, they turn them into zombies. The ants become compelled to climb to the top of elevated vegetation, where they remain affixed and die. The high elevation allows the fungus to grow and later spread its spores widely. Researchers from Pennsylvania State (Penn State) University found that O. unilateralis take full control of the ants' muscle fibers, forcing them to move as it "wants" them to. "We found that a high percentage of the cells in a host were fungal cells," notes David Hughes, who is associate professor of entomology and biology at Penn State. "In essence, these manipulated animals were a fungus in ants' clothing." David Hughes Below, you can watch a video showing how the parasitic fungus infects its victims, leading them to their death. 2. Zombie spiders

Last year, zoologist Philippe Fernandez-Fournier — from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada — and colleagues made a chilling discovery in the Ecuadorian Amazon. A species of parasitic wasps takes full control of small, social spiders, driving them to their death. They found that a previously unknown species of the Zatypota wasp can manipulate spiders from the Anelosimus eximius species to an extent that researchers have never before witnessed in nature. A. eximius spiders are social animals that prefer to remain in groups, never straying too far from their colonies. But Fernandez-Fournier and team noticed that members of this species infected with Zatypota larva exhibited bizarre behavior, leaving their colony to weave tightly-spun, cocoon-like webs in remote locations. When the researchers opened these artificial "cocoons," they found Zatypota larvae growing inside. Further research presented a gruesome string of events. The Zatypota wasps lay eggs on the abdomen of A. eximius spiders. When the egg hatches and the wasp larva emerges, it starts feeding on the spider and begins to take control of its body. When the larva has gained full control of its host, it turns it into a zombie-like creature that is compelled to stray away from its mates and spin the cocoon-like nest that will allow the larva to grow into the adult wasp. Before entering its new "cocoon," though, the wasp larva first finishes its "job" by devouring its host. "Wasps manipulating the behavior of spiders has been observed before, but not at a level as complex as this," says Fernandez-Fournier. "[T]his behavior modification is so hardcore. The wasp completely hijacks the spider's behavior and brain and makes it do something it would never do, like leave its nest and spinning a completely different structure. That's very dangerous for these tiny spiders." Philippe Fernandez-Fournier 3. The reanimated virus

Reanimating humans, or, at least, human-like creatures, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or H. P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West: Reanimator," is a notion that has piqued the interest of writers, filmmakers and, of course, scientists, throughout the ages. A newly 'reanimated' giant virus from the Siberian permafrost offers a chilling warning of possible dangers to come. But while reviving dead humans may not be on the cards for our race just yet, reviving other organisms is. This can be particularly unsettling when we think that those organisms are... viruses. In 2014, researchers from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Aix–Marseille Université in France dug a fascinating organism out of the Siberian permafrost: a so-called giant virus, about 30,000 years old, which they named Pithovirus sibericum. Giant viruses are called this way because, though still tiny, they are easily visible under the microscope. But there is something else that makes P. sibericum stand apart. It is a DNA virus that contains a large number of genes — as many as 500, to be precise. This is in stark contrast with other DNA viruses, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which only contains about 12 genes in all. The size of giant viruses, as well as the fact that they contain such a large amount of DNA, can make them particularly dangerous, explain the researchers who discovered P. sibericum since they can stick around for an extremely long time. "Among known viruses, the giant viruses tend to be very tough, almost impossible to break open," explain two of the virus's discoverers, Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, in an interview for National Geographic. "Special environments such as deep ocean sediments and permafrost are very good preservers of microbes [and viruses] because they are cold, anoxic [oxygen-free], and [...] dark," they add. When "reanimated, P. sibericum only infected amoebas — archaic unicellular organisms — but happily not humans or other animals. Yet Claverie and Abergel warn that there may be similar giant viruses buried inside the permafrost that could prove dangerous to humans. Though they have remained safely contained so far, global heating and human action could cause them to resurface and come back to life, which might bring about unknown threats to health. "Mining and drilling mean [...] digging through these ancient layers for the first time in millions of years. If 'viable' [viruses] are still there, this is a good recipe for disaster." Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel 4. Zombie plants

Also, in 2014, researchers from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, United Kingdom, found that certain bacteria, known as "phytoplasma," turn some plants into "zombies." Plants such as goldenrods can succumb to the control of manipulative bacteria. The bacteria — which insects disseminate — infect plants such as goldenrods, which have yellow flowers. The infection causes the goldenrods to put out leaf-like extensions instead of their usual blooms. These leaf-like growths attract more insects, which allows the bacteria to "travel" widely and infect other plants. While the transformation does not cause the plant to die, researchers are fascinated by how phytoplasma can bend this host's "will" to make it grow the elements they require to spread and thrive. "The insects transmit bacteria, so-called phytoplasmas, which destroy the life cycle of the plants," says Prof. Günter Theißen from Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, one of the researchers who have closely studied the activity of phytoplasma. "These plants become the living dead. Eventually, they only serve the spread of the bacteria." Prof. Günter Theißen 5. Human zombies?

Photo of a Human zombies

But can humans turn into zombies, too? In the 1990s, Dr. Chavannes Douyon and Prof. Roland Littlewood decided to investigate whether Haitian zombies — reanimated, but mindless humans — were a real possibility. People with Cotard's syndrome are convinced that they are dead. In 1997, the two published a study paper in The LancetTrusted Source in which they analyzed the cases of three individuals from Haiti whose communities had identified as zombies. One was a 30-year-old woman who had, allegedly, quickly died after having fallen ill. Her family recognized her walking about as a "zombie" 3 years after this event. Another was a young man who had "died" at 18, and reemerged after another 18 years at a cockfight. The final case study concerned another woman who had "died" at 18 but was spotted again as a zombie 13 years after this event. Dr. Douyon and Prof. Littlewood examined the three "zombies," and found that they had not been the victims of an evil spell. Instead, medical reasons could explain their zombification. The first "zombie" had catatonic schizophrenia, a rare condition that makes the person act as though they are walking in a stupor. The second person had experienced brain damage, and also had epilepsy, while the third appeared merely to have a learning disability. "People with a chronic schizophrenic illness, brain damage, or learning disability are not uncommonly met with wandering in Haiti, and they would be particularly likely to be identified as lacking volition and memory which are characteristics of a zombi," the researchers write in their paper. But there is also a specific psychiatric disorder called Cotard's syndrome that can cause people to act like zombies. This is because they are under the delusion that they are dead or decomposing. It remains unclear just how prevalent this condition is, but research suggests that it is a rare occurrence. Documented cases of people with Cotard's syndrome are unsettling, nevertheless. One case studyTrusted Source reports the situation of a 53-year-old woman who "was complaining that she was dead, smelled like rotting flesh, and wanted to be taken to a morgue so that she could be with dead people." AnotherTrusted Source speaks of a 65-year-old man who had developed a belief that his organs — including his brain — had stopped working, and that even the house in which he lived was slowly but steadily falling apart. At some point, the man attempted to take his own life. Researchers report that "[h]is suicide note revealed that he wanted to kill himself as he feared spreading a deadly infection to the villagers who resultantly might suffer from cancer." Do such cases mean that zombies are real in some way, or, just as our fascination with the figure of the zombie in folklore and popular culture, do they merely reflect our uneasy relationship with death? We leave it to you to decide. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); via Blogger https://ift.tt/33qXE2J

[blackkudos]

Wanda Sykes

Wanda Sykes (born March 7, 1964) is an American comedian, writer, actress and voice artist. She was first recognized for her work as a writer on The Chris Rock Show, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999. In 2004, Entertainment Weekly named Sykes as one of the 25 funniest people in America. She is also known for her role as Barb Baran on CBS' The New Adventures of Old Christine (2006–10) and for appearances on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–11).

Aside from her television appearances, Sykes has also had a career in film, appearing in Monster-in-Law (2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Evan Almighty (2007) and License to Wed (2007), as well as voicing characters in the animated films Over the Hedge (2006), Barnyard (2006), Brother Bear 2 (2006), Rio (2011), Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) and Ice Age: Collision Course (2016).

Early life

Sykes was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and raised in the Washington, D.C., area. Her mother, Marion Louise (née Peoples), worked as a banker, and her father, Harry Ellsworth Sykes, was a US Army colonel employed at the Pentagon. Sykes attended Arundel High School in Gambrills, Maryland, and went on to graduate from Hampton University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. After college, her first job was as a contracting specialist at the National Security Agency (NSA), where she worked for five years.

Sykes' family history was researched for an episode of the 2012 PBS genealogy program Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr. Her ancestry was traced back to a 1683 court case involving her paternal ninth great-grandmother Elizabeth Banks, a free white woman and indentured servant, who gave birth to a biracial child, Mary Banks, fathered by a slave, who inherited her mother's free status. According to historian Ira Berlin, a specialist in the history of American slavery, the Sykes family history is "the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present."

Career

Not completely satisfied with her role with the NSA, Sykes began her stand-up career at a Coors Light Super Talent Showcase in Washington, DC, where she performed for the first time in front of a live audience in 1987.

She continued to hone her talents at local venues while at the NSA until 1992, when she moved to New York City. Working for the Hal Leonard publishing house, she edited a book entitled Polyrhythms – The Musician's Guide, by Peter Magadini. Her first big break came when opening for Chris Rock at Caroline's Comedy Club.

In 1997, she joined the writing team on The Chris Rock Show and also made many appearances on the show. The writing team was nominated for four Emmys, and in 1999, won for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music, or Comedy Special.

Since that time, she has appeared in such films as Pootie Tang and on TV shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm. In 2003, she starred in her own short-lived Fox network sitcom, Wanda at Large. The same year, Sykes appeared in an hour-long Comedy Central special, Tongue Untied. That network also ranked her No. 70 on its list of the 100 greatest all-time stand ups. She served as a correspondent for HBO's Inside the NFL, hosted Comedy Central's popular show Premium Blend, and voiced a recurring character named Gladys on Comedy Central's puppet show Crank Yankers. She also had a short-lived show on Comedy Central called Wanda Does It.

In addition to her film and television work, she is also an author. She wrote Yeah, I Said It, a book of humorous observations on various topics, published in September 2004.

In 2006, she landed a recurring role as Barb, opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on the sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine; she became a series regular during the series' third season in 2008. She also guest starred in the Will & Grace episode "Buy, Buy Baby" in 2006. She provided voices for the 2006 films Over the Hedge, Barnyard, and Brother Bear 2. She had a part in My Super Ex-Girlfriend and after playing in Evan Almighty, had a bit part in License to Wed. Sykes' first HBO Comedy Special, entitled Wanda Sykes: Sick & Tired, premiered on October 14, 2006; it was nominated for a 2007 Emmy Award. In 2008, she performed as part of Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Tour for LGBT rights.

In October 2008, Wanda Sykes appeared in a television ad for the Think Before You Speak Campaign, an advertising campaign by GLSEN aimed at curbing homophobic slang in youth communities. In the 30-second spot, she uses humor to scold a teenager for saying "that's so gay" when he really means "that is so bad".

In March 2009, it was announced that Sykes would be the host of a new late-night talk show on Saturdays on Fox, The Wanda Sykes Show which was scheduled to premiere November 7, 2009. In April 2009, she was named in Out magazine's "Annual Power 50 List", landing at number 35.

In May 2009, Sykes was the featured entertainer for the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, becoming both the first African American woman and the first openly LGBT person to get the role. Cedric the Entertainer had been the first African American to become the featured entertainer in 2005. At this event, Sykes made controversial headlines as she responded to conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh's comments regarding President Barack Obama. Limbaugh, in reference to Obama's presidential agenda, had said "I hope he fails". In response, Sykes quipped: "I hope his [Limbaugh's] kidneys fail, how 'bout that? Needs a little waterboarding, that's what he needs."

Her second comedy special, Wanda Sykes: I'ma Be Me premiered on HBO in October 2009. November 2009 saw the premier of The Wanda Sykes Show, which starts with a monologue and continues with a panel discussion in a similar format to Bill Maher's shows Real Time with Bill Maher and Politically Incorrect.

She appeared as Miss Hannigan in a professional theatre production of Annie at The Media Theatre in Media, PA, a suburb 25 minutes southwest of Philadelphia. Her first appearance in a musical, she played the role from November 23 – December 12, 2010, and again from January 12–23, 2011. She voices the Witch in the Bubble Guppies episode "Bubble Puppy's Fin-tastic Fairlytale Adventure".

In 2012, Sykes role the voice of Granny in Ice Age: Continental Drift, and In 2016, she was returned voice of Granny in Ice Age: Collision Course from the Blue Sky Studios' "Ice Age movies".

In May 2013, Sykes was a featured entertainer at Olivia Travel's 40th anniversary Music & Comedy Festival in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

In 2013, Sykes appeared in eight episodes of Amazon's Alpha House, a political comedy series written by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. Sykes plays Rosalyn DuPeche, a Democratic Senator from Illinois and the next door neighbor of four Republican senators living together in a house on Capitol Hill. Sykes will also appear in Season Two, which is filming over the summer of 2014.

Personal life

Sykes was married to record producer Dave Hall from 1991 to 1998. In November 2008, she publicly came out as a lesbian while at a same-sex marriage rally in Las Vegas regarding Proposition 8. A month earlier, Sykes had married her partner Alex Niedbalski, a French woman, whom she had met in 2006. The couple also became parents on April 27, 2009, when Alex gave birth to a pair of fraternal twins, daughter Olivia Lou and son Lucas Claude.

Sykes only came out to her conservative mother Marion and father Harry when she was 40, who both initially had difficulty accepting her homosexuality. They declined to attend her wedding with Alex, which led to a brief period of estrangement, but have since reconciled and are now proud grandparents to the couple's children.

During a September 19, 2011, appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Sykes announced that she had been diagnosed earlier in the year with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Although DCIS is a non-invasive "stage zero breast cancer", Sykes had elected to have a bilateral mastectomy in order to lower her chances of getting breast cancer.

Sykes splits time living in both Los Angeles and Media, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.

Activism

Sykes has publicly expressed being devastated after California voters passed state Proposition 8. She said: "with the legislation that they passed, I can’t sit by and just watch. I just can’t do it." She has continued to be active in same-sex marriage issues hosting events and emceeing fundraisers. She has also worked with PETA on promoting dog anti-chaining legislation in her home state.

She has been an outspoken supporter of Detroit's Ruth Ellis Center after the organization's staff sent Sykes a letter asking her to visit during her 2010 tour's stop in Detroit.

Awards

Sykes has been nominated for seven Primetime Emmys, with one win (in 1999) for "Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Special". In 2001, she won the American Comedy Award for "Outstanding Female Stand Up Comic". She won a Comedy Central Commie Award for "Funniest TV Actress in 2003". In 2010 she won the GLAAD Stephen F. Kolzak Award. In 2015 she won the Activism in the Arts honor at the Triumph Awards.

Wikipedia

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: Why Food Could Be the Best Medicine of All

When Tom Shicowich’s toe started feeling numb in 2010, he brushed it off as a temporary ache. At the time, he didn’t have health insurance, so he put off going to the doctor. The toe became infected, and he got so sick that he stayed in bed for two days with what he assumed was the flu. When he finally saw a doctor, the physician immediately sent Shicowich to the emergency room. Several days later, surgeons amputated his toe, and he ended up spending a month in the hospital to recover.

Shicowich lost his toe because of complications of Type 2 diabetes as he struggled to keep his blood sugar under control. He was overweight and on diabetes medications, but his diet of fast food and convenient, frozen processed meals had pushed his disease to life-threatening levels.

After a few more years of trying unsuccessfully to treat Shicowich’s diabetes, his doctor recommended that he try a new program designed to help patients like him. Launched in 2017 by the Geisinger Health System at one of its community hospitals, the Fresh Food Farmacy provides healthy foods–heavy on fruits, vegetables, lean meats and low-sodium options–to patients in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, and teaches them how to incorporate those foods into their daily diet. Each week, Shicowich, who lives below the federal poverty line and is food-insecure, picks up recipes and free groceries from the Farmacy’s food bank and has his nutrition questions answered and blood sugar monitored by the dietitians and health care managers assigned to the Farmacy. In the year and a half since he joined the program, Shicowich has lost 60 lb., and his A1C level, a measure of his blood sugar, has dropped from 10.9 to 6.9, which means he still has diabetes but it’s out of the dangerous range. “It’s a major, major difference from where I started from,” he says. “It’s been a life-changing, lifesaving program for me.”

Geisinger’s program is one of a number of groundbreaking efforts that finally consider food a critical part of a patient’s medical care–and treat food as medicine that can have as much power to heal as drugs. More studies are revealing that people’s health is the sum of much more than the medications they take and the tests they get–health is affected by how much people sleep and exercise, how much stress they’re shouldering and, yes, what they are eating at every meal. Food is becoming a particular focus of doctors, hospitals, insurers and even employers who are frustrated by the slow progress of drug treatments in reducing food-related diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and even cancer. They’re also encouraged by the growing body of research that supports the idea that when people eat well, they stay healthier and are more likely to control chronic diseases and perhaps even avoid them altogether. “When you prioritize food and teach people how to prepare healthy meals, lo and behold, it can end up being more impactful than medications themselves,” says Dr. Jaewon Ryu, interim president and CEO of Geisinger. “That’s a big win.”

The problem is that eating healthy isn’t as easy as popping a pill. For some, healthy foods simply aren’t available. And if they are, they aren’t affordable. So more hospitals and physicians are taking action to break down these barriers to improve their patients’ health. In cities where fresh produce is harder to access, hospitals have worked with local grocers to provide discounts on fruits and vegetables when patients provide a “prescription” written by their doctor; the Cleveland Clinic sponsors farmers’ markets where local growers accept food assistance vouchers from federal programs like WIC as well as state-led initiatives. And some doctors at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco hand out recipes instead of (or along with) prescriptions for their patients, pulled from the organization’s Thrive Kitchen, which also provides low-cost monthly cooking classes for members of its health plan. Hospitals and clinics across the country have also visited Geisinger’s program to learn from its success.

But doctors alone can’t accomplish this food transformation. Recognizing that healthier members not only live longer but also avoid expensive visits to the emergency room, insurers are starting to reward healthy eating by covering sessions with nutritionists and dietitians. In February, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts began covering tailored meals from the nonprofit food program Community Servings for its members with congestive heart failure who can’t afford the low-fat, low-sodium meals they need. Early last year, Congress assigned a first ever bipartisan Food Is Medicine working group to explore how government-sponsored food programs could address hunger and also lower burgeoning health care costs borne by Medicare when it comes to complications of chronic diseases. “The idea of food as medicine is not only an idea whose time has come,” says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “It’s an idea that’s absolutely essential to our health care system.”

Ask any doctor how to avoid or mitigate the effects of the leading killers of Americans and you’ll likely hear that eating healthier plays a big role. But knowing intuitively that food can influence health is one thing, and having the science and the confidence to back it up is another. And it’s only relatively recently that doctors have started to bridge this gap.

It’s hard to look at health outcomes like heart disease and cancer that develop over long periods of time and tie them to specific foods in the typical adult’s varied diet. Plus, foods are not like drugs that can be tested in rigorous studies that compare people who eat a cup of blueberries a day, for example, with those who don’t to determine if the fruit can prevent cancers. Foods aren’t as discrete as drugs when it comes to how they act on the body either–they can contain a number of beneficial, and possibly less beneficial, ingredients that work in divergent systems.

Doctors also know that we eat not only to feed our cells but also because of emotions, like feeling happy or sad. “It’s a lot cheaper to put someone on three months of statins [to lower their cholesterol] than to figure out how to get them to eat a healthy diet,” says Eric Rimm, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But drugs are expensive–the average American spends $1,400 a year on medications–and if people can’t afford them, they go without, increasing the likelihood that they’ll develop complications as they progress to severe stages of their illness, which in turn forces them to require more–and costly–health care. What’s more, it’s not as if the medications are cure-alls; while deaths from heart disease are declining, for example, the most recent report from the American Heart Association showed that the prevalence of obesity increased from 30.5% in 1999–2000 to 37.7% in 2013–2014, and 40% of adults have high total cholesterol.

What people are eating contributes to those stubborn trends, and making nutrition a bigger priority in health care instead of an afterthought may finally start to reverse them. Although there aren’t the same types of rigorous trials proving food’s worth that there are for drugs, the data that do exist, from population-based studies of what people eat, as well as animal and lab studies of specific active ingredients in food, all point in the same direction.

The power of food as medicine gained scientific credibility in 2002, when the U.S. government released results of a study that pitted a diet and exercise program against a drug treatment for Type 2 diabetes. The Diabetes Prevention Program compared people assigned to a diet low in saturated fat, sugar and salt that included lean protein and fresh fruits and vegetables with people assigned to take metformin to lower blood sugar. Among people at high risk of developing diabetes, those taking metformin lowered their risk of actually getting diabetes by 31% compared with those taking a placebo, while those who modified their diet and exercised regularly lowered their risk by 58% compared with those who didn’t change their behaviors, a near doubling in risk reduction.

Studies showing that food could treat disease as well soon followed. In 2010, Medicare reimbursed the first lifestyle-based program for treating heart disease, based on decades of work by University of California, San Francisco, heart expert Dr. Dean Ornish. Under his plan, people who had had heart attacks switched to a low-fat diet, exercised regularly, stopped smoking, lowered their stress levels with meditation and strengthened their social connections. In a series of studies, he found that most followers lowered their blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol levels and also reversed some of the blockages in their heart arteries, reducing their episodes of angina.

In recent years, other studies have shown similar benefits for healthy eating patterns like the Mediterranean diet–which is high in good fats like olive oil and omega-3s, nuts, fruits and vegetables–in preventing repeat events for people who have had a heart attack. “It’s clear that people who are coached on how to eat a Mediterranean diet high in nuts or olive oil get more benefit than we’ve found in similarly conducted trials of statins [to lower cholesterol],” says Rimm. Researchers found similar benefit for people who have not yet had a heart attack but were at higher risk of having one.

Animal studies and analyses of human cells in the lab are also starting to expose why certain foods are associated with lower rates of disease. Researchers are isolating compounds like omega-3s found in fish and polyphenols in apples, for example, that can inhibit cancer tumors’ ability to grow new blood vessels. Nuts and seeds can protect parts of our chromosomes so they can repair damage they encounter more efficiently and help cells stay healthy longer.

If food is indeed medicine, then it’s time to treat it that way. In his upcoming book, Eat to Beat Disease, Dr. William Li, a heart expert, pulled together years of accumulated data and proposes specific doses of foods that can treat diseases ranging from diabetes to breast cancer. Not all doctors agree that the science supports administering food like drugs, but he’s hoping the controversial idea will prompt more researchers to study food in ways as scientifically rigorous as possible and generate stronger data in coming years. “We are far away from prescribing diets categorically to fight disease,” he says. “And we may never get there. But we are looking to fill in the gaps that have long existed in this field with real science. This is the beginning of a better tomorrow.”

And talking about food in terms of doses might push more doctors to put down their prescription pads and start going over grocery lists with their patients instead. So far, the several hundred people like Shicowich who rely on the Fresh Food Farmacy have lowered their risk of serious diabetes complications by 40% and cut hospitalizations by 70% compared with other diabetic people in the area who don’t have access to the program. This year, on the basis of its success so far, the Fresh Food Farmacy is tripling the number of patients it supports.

Shicowich knows firsthand how important that will be for people like him. When he was first diagnosed, he lost weight and controlled his blood sugar, but he found those changes hard to maintain and soon saw his weight balloon and his blood-sugar levels skyrocket. He’s become one of the program’s better-known success stories and now works part time in the produce section of a supermarket and cooks nearly all his meals. He’s expanding his cooking skills to include fish, which he had never tried preparing before. “I know what healthy food looks like, and I know what to do with it now,” he says. “Without this program, and without the support system, I’d probably still be sitting on the couch with a box of Oreos.”

This appears in the March 04, 2019 issue of TIME. via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[deniscollins]

Legal Rights for Lake Erie? Voters in Ohio City Will Decide

Lake Erie has faced a string of environmental calamities — poisonous algal blooms, runoff containing fertilizer and animal manure, and a constant threat from invasive fish, many of them attributed to business. If the lake gets legal rights, the theory goes, people can sue polluters on its behalf. Should Lake Erie, which supports the economies of four states, one Canadian province, and the cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, have the legal right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve”: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

The failing health of Lake Erie, the world’s 11th largest lake, is at the heart of one of the most unusual questions to appear on an American ballot: Should a body of water be given rights normally associated with those granted to a person?

Voters in Toledo, Ohio, will be asked this month to decide whether Lake Erie, which supports the economies of four states, one Canadian province and the cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, has the legal right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.”

The peculiar ballot question comes amid a string of environmental calamities at the lake — poisonous algal blooms in summer, runoff containing fertilizer and animal manure, and a constant threat from invasive fish. But this special election is not merely symbolic. It is legal strategy: If the lake gets legal rights, the theory goes, people can sue polluters on its behalf.

The proposed Lake Erie Bill of Rights is part of a growing number of efforts to carve out legal status for elements of nature, including rivers, forests, mountains and even wild rice. The efforts, which began decades ago but have gathered momentum in recent years, seek to show that existing laws are insufficient to protect nature against environmental harm. Under current law, lakes and deserts do not have legal standing, so people cannot sue on their behalf.

In Toledo, residents and elected officials say they believe the initiative has a good chance of being approved, but there is a catch: The measure’s own backers acknowledge that it is likely to be challenged in court as having little or no legal footing, and that it could ultimately be invalidated as reaching beyond the scope of city law.

The initiative’s main opponents are the owners of area farms, where much of the agricultural runoff that feeds the lake’s toxic algaeoriginates. Farmers say that if the measure passes thousands of small farms could be sued for damages for polluting the lake and driven out of business.

Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit group based in Pennsylvania that helped write the measure, said existing environmental laws were inadequate.

The intent of the initiative, Mr. Linzey said, is twofold — to send a warning that the community is fed up with a lack of state and federal action to protect Lake Erie, and to force the courts to recognize that ecosystems like the lake “possess independent rights to survive and be healthy.”

In other words, that rivers have a right to flow, forests have a right to thrive and lakes have a right to be clean.

Even if that concept never becomes the law of the land, the group says that its efforts are meant to make it clear that places like Toledo will oppose what they see as environmental degradation, sending an unsubtle message that certain companies might want to look elsewhere to do business.

The broader idea, environmentalists say, is a rethinking of nature and an individual’s place in it.

“There’s no precedent for any of this,” Mr. Linzey said. “It is almost a new consciousness — that a community is not just Homo sapiens.”

As the Feb. 26 Election Day approaches, some Toledo residents say their dependence on Lake Erie has made the question of the lake’s rights more than theoretical.

In 2014, the city went without drinking water for three days when the lake became so fouled by phosphorus runoff from upstream farms that household water was fit only for flushing toilets.

Stores closed. Hospitals accepted only the most seriously ill patients. Restaurants were empty. And some 500,000 people depended on bottled water in the middle of a brutally hot August.

“The city of Toledo shut down,” said Crystal Jankowski, 31, who was in a hospital delivering her daughter during the water crisis. “They were having to cancel surgeries because they couldn’t sterilize equipment.”

While the idea of nature having rights has been around for centuries, environmental advocates point to a 1972 United States Supreme Court decision, Sierra Club v. Morton, as providing much of the impetus for current efforts.

In that case, the court ultimately rejected the notion of nature’s rights, but Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a dissent that “contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”

The recent push started in earnest about 15 years ago, when Mr. Linzey’s group began working with towns and cities to protect local natural resources. The concept has won support in dozens of municipalities — from cities with long histories of environmental activism to unexpected places.

Tamaqua Borough, Pa., in the center of the state’s historic coal-mining region, was the first place in the nation to approve a rights-of-nature ordinance in 2006 after it banned companies from dumping dredged minerals and sewage sludge into open pit mines.

The bill approved by the borough council included language that said corporations could not “interfere with the existence and flourishing of natural communities or ecosystems, or to cause damage” to them within the township.

Four years later, Pittsburgh approved a rights-of-nature ordinance that prohibited fracking in city limits.

Santa Monica, Calif., has since passed an ordinance that requires the city to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish.”

And earlier this year, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota announced that it had granted wild rice its own legal rights, including “the right to pure water.”

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has been involved in each of the efforts, said similar laws were now on the books in municipalities in Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Ohio and Virginia.

In Toledo, much of Lake Erie is frozen over this winter. But nearly every summer for the last several years, water runoff from large farms flowed into the lake and produced a slick green coating of toxic algae so expansive that it could be seen from space.

The 2014 water crisis failed to spur a state or federal crackdown on large farms in the Maumee River basin, where fertilizers used for crops contain phosphorus, which is washed into streams and eventually the river during rainstorms.

Once in the lake, the phosphorus feeds the algae, which produces microcystin, a toxin that causes diarrhea, vomiting and liver-function problems in humans and can kill small animals — including dogs — that ingest it.

Yvonne Lesicko, vice president for public policy at the Ohio Farm Bureau, acknowledged that farms were the primary culprit, but also pointed to other sources of harmful runoff like lawns, septic systems and golf courses.

Ms. Lesicko said farmers have sought to limit the amount of runoff, but estimated that measures like using less fertilizer and building berms may take as long as 15 or 20 years to produce results.

The ballot initiative, she said, was not a reasoned response to a complex problem.

“We care very much about the lake,” Ms. Lesicko said. “But this is not a solution. In fact, it is counterproductive. This is going to lead to lots of lawsuits and stress.”

The issue has also put Toledo’s elected officials in an unenviable position. They say that if they oppose the measure, they fear they will appear to support polluting the lake.

But backing the initiative could be worse, some reason, because the measure could cost the city tens of thousands of dollars to defend in court with no guarantee that it will survive legal review. Toledo, still heavily reliant on the automobile industry, has struggled economically in recent years.

“I think everybody is frustrated,” said Nick Komives, a City Council member, who said he supported a clean lake, but opposed the measure because it would most likely drain city finances. “The initiative is a powerful tactic. And for me, coming from an activist background, it is important to send messages. But this is probably unconstitutional.”