Read This Now - The Women of SCOTUS

Fascinating interview with Justice Ginsburg, centered on her experiences as a woman and often the only woman on the Supreme Court, from last weekend's NYT Magazine.

After swiftly returning to the Court from a cancer related surgery Ginsburg has been feistier than ever, recently reading several of her dissents from the bench.

Dan Froomkin Resurfaces

Froomkin, late of the WaPo, will be running the DC section of HuffPo.

Details at Salon, via Bloggasm.

Nice how he's going from one Po to another, really helps tie things together.

Update

No I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, thanks for asking. I've only gone to Beaufort (North not South Carolina).

The bottom line is that things will be slow for the next month and a half while I teeter through limited internet access, moving, and starting grad school. By late August / early September things should be back on track.

What this actually means is that there will be more of Read This Now and short pieces will dominate the scene (wait they already do, I'm not writing really long in depth stuff unless someone pays me) also expect to see much more on the environmental issues of the day (it's what I'm going back to school for) and less on politics in general (I am after all, moving back outside the beltway).

That said, the economy still looks pretty bad...



(via CR)

And when I say environmental issues, expect them to often involve the water and things that swim in it, so check out this NPR piece on Community Supported Fisheries, one should be coming to Durham this fall.

Read This Now - Straight From The Horse's Mouth

Well Sarah Palin announced her resignation as Governor of Alaska today (man does she have some top notch advisers or what?) and, well you should just see for yourself.

If you manage to wade through her statement on her website (good luck) a friend posed the interesting question of what grade you'd give as a writing assignment is say middle or high school?

(It's a figure of speech people)

Read This Now - Climate Change Can't Wait

Three important, incensed, and increasingly urgent takes on climate change legislation and it's squeaking through the house last week.

Paul Krugman labels climate change deniers traitors to humanity.

NASA's head scientist (New Yorker profile, sub. req. first time I've run into that sorry. blog update) thinks it may be too late already (too bad no one's listened to him as he's correctly predicted climate change for the past 30 years).

And Nate Silver examines the attacks on how much climate change will cost economically and puts things neatly into perspective (hint doing nothing would roughly equal wiping out 43% of the planets population, in economic terms).

Our Oceans Are Haunted

Regardless of whether you believe in ghosts, ghost nets, traps, and pots in the form of lost fishing gear are a very real problem.

I started thinking about them a while back when the Shifting Baselines blog (currently defunct) ran a piece with video of teams capturing ghost nets in Puget Sound, more recently Tim Wheeler at the (now also defunct) Bay & Environment blog had an interesting story on paying out of work Virgina waterman (due to fisheries closures based on decreasing stocks) to round up ghost crab pots in VA's parts of the Chesapeake Bay.

That effort removed 8,600 pots and 61 nets containing more than 5,000 crabs, the going estimate is apparently 50 crabs per ghost pot a year. NOAA and the MD DNR estimated a couple of years ago that 42,000 ghost pots probably haunt MD's Chesapeake waters. Frustratingly that study has apparently yet to be followed up on even though they promised next steps and information on capturing ghost pots in late 2008. (A recent Environmental News Service article puts the number of estimated Chesapeake ghost pots at 150,000, albeit with no support)

The UN Environment Program released a report this spring on the growing threat posed by ghost fishing gear. Worldwide 10% of ocean debris is thought to be deadly ghost gear (that weighs in at 640,000 tons) which adds up to a lot of dead fish and other critters, none of which we get to eat either.

Here is the first video to pop up on YouTube, from Oregon Public TV...


(if you want to see more just type in ghost nets)

PC Speaks At Radio & TV Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner

John Hodgman on his own personally compelling story and the ability of the Obama Administration to deal with our nation's historic jock / nerd rift...



(via kottke)