John Brown's Notes and Essays

If the governor signs the bill, Colorado would be the second state to legalize the composting of human remains. Katrina Spade, the co-founder and chief executive of Recompose, monitoring the temperature of a mound of wood chips that contains a human body. Her company offers human composting services in Washington State. Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times By Bryan Pietsch , The New York Times , April 29, 2021 Updated 1:28 p.m. ET [original article contains additional links.] DENVER — Food scraps and biodegradable utensils are common fodder for compost, but in Colorado, human remains could soon be transformed into soil too. The Colorado State Legislature passed a bill on Tuesday that would allow composting of human remains in lieu of traditional processes like burial and cremation. State Representative Brianna Titone [jb - see below Wikipedia entry ] , a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said she had gone to funerals and, seeing burial or cremation as the two options, thought, “...

Comparing the two budgets is as meaningless as comparing apples to onions. Let’s tend the whole orchard for a change. By  AMBASSADOR CHARLES RAY  | APRIL 25, 2021, Diplomatic Diary President Biden spoke at the Pentagon on February 10, 2021. Photo by Getty/AFP. R eflecting a historical pattern, almost half of the Biden administration’s recently proposed 2022 U.S. federal budget would be spent on defense, pending the approval of Congress. Judging by another historical trend, lawmakers are more likely to increase the requested amount than to lower it. At the same time, the White House’s proposal would make the international affairs budget bigger than ever. Even so, it would still be 12 times smaller than the funds for defense. As tempting as it may be to compare the two budgets, however, doing so is as meaningless as comparing apples to onions. Let’s first  get the numbers  out of the way. In its so-called base discretionary request, the new administration has asked fo...

From The New York Times commentator Frank Bruni's newsletter (via email)  Lady Gaga. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times Punctuation is personal. Punctuation inspires passion. And I suffer from alliteration excess. Those are the lessons from your responses to my denigration of the Oxford comma in last week’s newsletter and from my last three sentences. Dozens of you wrote in either to affirm my anti-Oxford-comma position or to disagree strongly with it. The disagreements outnumbered the affirmations, and they’re what I’ll showcase here. They boiled down to one word: clarity. Many of you rightly pointed out that abandonment of the Oxford or serial comma, which comes before the “and” and the last part of a list of three or more things, can yield confusion. As Gary Singer of East Lansing, Mich., wrote: There is a significant difference between these two statements, and that itty bitty comma creates that separation. “He loves his parents, Tony Bennett, and Lady Gaga.” “He loves his ...

Stevens (in his youth; middle of back row), image (not from article)  from by  Christina Ennis  and  Chimène Keitner , just security.org April 23, 2021   On April 14, UC Hastings Law School hosted the  7th annual Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens Lecture  honoring the memory, life, and work of UC Hastings graduate Chris Stevens, who was killed when the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked in September 2012.  This year’s lecture  featured former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Doug Wilson, in conversation with Ambassadors Mike McFaul and Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley. This year’s lecture was inspired by a  Just Security  piece  Wilson wrote with Angelic Young and Alex Pascal in December 2020. Those who were unable to attend the virtual event live can view it online  here .  Ambassador Stevens’ colleagues and admirers  referred to him  as the “quintessential diplomat.” He bega...