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They make it worse because in an anything-goes model of debate, might makes right and the most powerful teams or institutions would be able to dominate---smaller schools or people who read tighter and more nuanced arguments, for example, would lose out because they wouldn’t have the ability to deal with everyone saying whatever the hell they wanted!

They don’t solve resource disparities---many of those stem from institutional dynamics like funding, filtered through university endowments and alumni donations---voting aff does nothing to alter those disparities! Inculcating debate based on nuanced testing, however, does provide the ability to navigate complex institutional dynamics and improve these kinds of resource disparities!

Note also that those Articles clearly distinguished "United States of America" from "United States" in Congress assembled. The States formally delegated certain powers to the federal government, which is clearly identified in those Articles as the "United States". Therefore, the "United States of America" now refer to the 50 States of the Union, and the term "United States" refers to the federal government. The term "United States" is the term that is used consistently now throughout Title 28 to refer to the federal government domiciled in D.C. There is only ONE PLACE in all of Title 28 where the term "United States of America" is used, and there it is used in correct contradistinction to "United States": Because Title 28 contains statutes which govern all federal courts, the consistent use of "United States" to refer to the federal government carries enormous weight. Title 28 is the latest word on this subject, as revised, codified and enacted into positive law on June 25, 1948. Moreover, the elevates Title 28 to the status of supreme Law of the Land.

This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to disagreement can be deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema draws attention to is the group polarization effect. When a group of like‐minded people deliberates an issue, informational and reputational cascades produce more extreme views in the process of their deliberations.105 The polarization and biases that are well documented for such groups 106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting voices. In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional deliberative polarization and biases.107 A second deliberative dysfunction mitigated by disagreement is superficial agreement, which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a “presumptuous ‘We’”108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes by challenging superficial agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements stemming from polarization or superficiality. Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if we do not come to terms. Each of the opposing positions will profit from the catharsis it received “by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it”.

These advantages of disagreement in collective deliberations are mirrored on the individual level. Even if the probability of reaching a consensus with our opponents is very low from the beginning, as might be the case in deeply entrenched conflicts, entering into an exchange of arguments can still serve to test and improve our position. We have to do the “labor of the negative” for ourselves. Even if we cannot come up with a line of argument that coheres well with everybody else’s beliefs, attitudes and dispositions, we can still come up with a line of argument that achieves this goal for our own personal beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. To provide ourselves with the most coherent system of our own beliefs, attitudes and dispositions is – at least in important issues – an aspect of personal integrity – to borrow one of Dworkin’s favorite expressions for a less aspirational idea.

"Intellectual property" is defined as a category of intangible rights protecting commercially valuable products of the human intellect, and the category comprises primarily trademark, copyright, and patent rights, but also includes trade-secret rights, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unfair competition.

Political and organisational structure of government The United States of America is a federal republic consisting of 50 states. States have their own constitutions and within each State there are at least two additional levels of government, generally designated as counties and cities, towns or villages. The relationships between different levels of government are complex and varied (see Section B for more information). The Federal Government is composed of three branches: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Budgetary decisionmaking is shared primarily by the legislative and executive branches. The general structure of these two branches relative to budget formulation and execution is as follows.

Political and organisational structure of government The United States of America is a federal republic consisting of 50 states. States have their own constitutions and within each State there are at least two additional levels of government, generally designated as counties and cities, towns or villages. The relationships between different levels of government are complex and varied (see Section B for more information). The Federal Government is composed of three branches: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Budgetary decisionmaking is shared primarily by the legislative and executive branches. The general structure of these two branches relative to budget formulation and execution is as follows.

But this note is not about doom and gloom. It is about choices we have to make together. Choices that move us from competition for water to collaboration on solutions to the challenges posed to us. Our hope is for cities, industry, agriculture and power to learn to work together in developing a sustainable and efficient way to manage water use. Through creativity, cooperation and better communication, we can find innovative and sustainable solutions to tackle water scarcity. With shared visions and clear priorities, maintaining a healthy standard of living will be obtainable for every population around the world. We need citizens and businesses to understand where the water comes from, what it costs to produce, and what the different choices of how we use and treat water mean in terms of costs and shortages. In cities and in industry, we need to find ways to better capture, store, treat and re-use water to improve our supply. We need to close the water cycle so “waste water” is useful water. We need to understand how improving irrigation efficiency in agriculture makes more water available with lower costs for all. In any county, or state or watershed we need to understand what water is available, how it is used, and how it could be used. Looking at our collective options together may save us money in the long run, help create jobs, and avoid water wars.

Governments and other organizations need to facilitate awareness as to our local and national water choices, and help establish plans and goals for how we can bring industry and other stakeholders together to meet the challenge. Proposals on how to incentivize conservation, allow water trading, develop new water system designs, green infrastructure, and ensure the high quality and quantity of supply at the lowest cost need to be developed together. Laws and regulations need to be re-examined to help us transition to a 21st century water economy.

In terms of industrial water use, which is increasing the most in terms of total percentage in global use, major multinational corporations like Unilever and Nestlé are leading the way to reduce their water footprints very significantly. Unilever reduced total water abstraction for its factories by 44% between 2008 and 2018. It reduced its total water abstraction in 2018 by 7.2% compared to 2017. It has saved 22 billion litres of water compared to 2008, with very significant increases in production.

Unilever’s average payback time for measures to increase water use efficiency has been just over two years. Reduced water consumption has also reduced its energy costs, since less water had to be pumped and heated, and less wastewater had to be treated. Between 2008 and 2017, water conservation reduced Unilever’s annual energy bills by €105 million.

Fragmentation It is estimated [Gafarov 1991] that the ASOs minimum mass which can cause full destruction of a spacecraft with an NRS, colliding at the most probable impact relative velocity 10 km/s is in the range of 1.65-33 kg. The corresponding mass for a fuel core would be in the range of 0.023-0.46 kg. According to the empirical dependence of the space object masses on their cross-section areas [Kessler and Cour-Palais 1978] the diameter of ASOs, causing full destruction of a spacecraft with a NRS, would be 23-85 cm; and that of a fuel core is 3.5-13 cm. The comparison of these results with actual parameters of ASOs in near-earth orbits suggests that possibility of ORM full destruction resulting from their collisions with other space objects is real. At present, there is no model of ORM fragmentation which can account for all possible characteristics of colliding objects and collision conditions. In this connection, the effect of fragmentation on lifetime was considered using an example of possible fragmentation of a spacecraft with a NPS into separate structural parts as it collides with an ASO. Design characteristics given in Table 2 correspond to an spacecraft of the "Kosmos-954" satellite type. In the analysis it was assumed that the aerodynamic drag coefficient is the same for all fragments, and that their lifetime is determined only by their mass ratios of M, to cross-section area, A. In Table 2 lifetimes, T I, are normalized to the lifetime of the most characteristic object: a NRS with an orbit transfer unit at the most unfavorable orientation-that is sideways to the incoming projectile (the angle of attack c = 90 ) . The lifetime of the NRS + OTU in these conditions amounts to 150 years. [[TABLE 2 OMITTED]] At Table 2 shows, the fragmentation analysis considered cases, ranging form complete spacecraft with NRS down to, separate fuel cores. The analysis showed that the orbital lifetime proved to be higher as the fragments become smaller in size. This effect is related to the fact that among these fragments the fuel core has the highest density. The orbit lifetime of fuel core fragments is shorter than that of the intact fuel core. Still it should be taken into account that the fragment radioactivity is lesser that activity of the whole fuel core. For example, the orbit lifetime of particle of 10 mm radius is about 150 years; that is approximately one third the orbit life of the fuel core. The radioactivity of such particle is only 10 -3 of the fuel core activity. The orbit lifetime of particles of 0.1 mm radius is only 1.5 years. But particles of such sizes originated from fuel cores of "Kosmos-954"-type satellite SNPSs constitute no danger for a man in approximately two weeks after reactor shut down. Thus, for the fragmentation model considered destruction of a spacecraft with a NRS does not involve an increase of radiation danger for the Earth population in spite of possible sharp reduction in orbital lifetime of fragments formed. It should not be noted, that the fragmentation model under consideration is characteristic for NRS designed and tested for aerodynamic dispersion during atmospheric reentry.

"[Plutonium] is so toxic that less than one-millionth of a gram, an invisible particle, is a carcinogenic dose. One pound, if uniformly distributed, could hypothetically induce lung cancer in every person on Earth." - Helen Caldicott

This quote, which is attributed to Dr. Helen Caldicott, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, exemplifies the the perception of using plutonium as a power source in robotic space missions. While the general field of nuclear power often evokes a passionate, negative response from the public, nuclear-powered spacecraft are of particular concern due to their ability to spread radioactive material on a global scale. This comes from the fact that if a launch vehicle carrying a nuclear or radioisotope powered craft were to fail during launch - a fairly common occurrence for launch vehicles - then the radioactive debris could be spread over the entire Earth by the strong winds of the upper atmosphere. [1] More startling is the fact that almost this exact scenario played out in 1964 when the Transit-5BN-3 satellite unexpectedly re-entered the atmosphere, burned up, and released enough radioactive material into the upper atmosphere to produce ~20,000 curies of radiation. [2] According to the prominent physicist/physician and Manhattan Project collaborator, John Gofman, this sole event is to blame for a global rise in lung cancer. [3] Furthermore, it is noted that the amount of radioactive material on the Transit-5BN-3 satellite is far from the largest quantity launched in a single spacecraft; that title belongs to NASA's Cassini orbiter.

In numerous articles and his book The Wrong Stuff, Grossman argued that an accident during Cassini’s launch or an inadvertent reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere during its "gravity assist" flyby could result in disintegration of the RTGs and a catastrophic release of plutonium into the atmosphere, threatening thousands if not millions of human lives.

Few reputable scientists supported Grossman’s analysis. RTGs had been used safely before, most notably on the Voyager 1 and 2 missions to the outer planets, launched in 1977, and the Galileo mission to Jupiter, launched in 1989. The late astronomer Carl Sagan, a strong opponent of nuclear weapons, endorsed the Cassini mission and urged the peace movement to focus on more urgent tasks.

In this paper, we give the reader a comprehensive overview of the current state of research and provide an up-to-date review of statistical studies on conflict and cooperation around transboundary river basins. Extending previous work, we conduct a systematic assessment and open the debate for the subsequent presentation of an integrative conceptual framework of the water-security-conflict nexus, which is exemplarily applied to the cases of the Nile River Basin and the Syr Darya and Amu Darya river systems.

Cross-case studies exploring historical trends in transboundary water conflicts find that conflictive interactions are rare.4,27,28 Since 1948, supposedly 37 violent conflicts occurred, in which water played a major role. Thirty of these conflicts alone were fought between Israel and its neighbors. On the other hand, there were 1831 ‘water-related incidents’ in the past 50 years in TFDD, of which more than two thirds were of a cooperative nature.19 The IRCC database even lists 4797 events in the same time period but also concludes that most of the recorded events are cooperative.23 De Stefano and others27 find that between 1948 and 1999 and from 2000 until 2008, there have been moves toward less cooperative interactions between some countries. However, most negative events were rather moderate expressions of discord and hostility with little evidence of violent conflict.

This field examines relations between hydro-climatic factors, conflict and adaptation at the national scale (Table 1). Findings suggest that cooperation trumps violent conflict by far, and that acute disputes involving violence are very limited with the only evidence for a genuinely water war pointing to an event 4,500 year ago (Wolf 2007). Countries sharing rivers engage more in disputes (Gleditsch et al. 2006) but when separating the effects of shared border and shared water the significance of the latter is reduced (Toset et al. 2000). Drought has no influence on disputes but the size of the basin does, suggesting that water abundance and related economic opportunities (e.g. hydropower) may be causing conflict (Gleditsch et al. 2006).

What accounts for this relative lack of hydro-scarcity conflict? Institutional arrangements seem to mitigate the risk of conflict (Tir and Stinnett 2012) depending on the design and efficacy of international water treaties. Countries with larger shared basins and larger GDP and population differences are more likely to enter a treaty agreement (Song and Whittington 2004). Compensations and side-payments are a common treaty mechanism in water quality agreements, but not in water quantity ones (Dombrowsky 2007). In a climate change context, resilient treaties adopt portfolio approaches that spread uncertainty risks by including diverse management arrangements simultaneously in open-ended strategies rather than rigid, codified rules (Drieschova et al. 2011). Also, transboundary water management institutions that are unable to absorb and effectively manage change—which points to the importance of time given to absorb change – as well as large or rapid changes in a basin’s physical (e.g. dam construction) or political (e.g. breakup of a nation) setting can be two key conflict-likelihood increasing factors (Wolf 2009).

But some scholars remained skeptical that examples from the Middle East reflected a more general connection between resource scarcity and war. Studies out of Norway showed that most of the conflicts Gleick identified were only verbal conflicts, threats of violence, or water-related violence in already-occurring wars. In other words, they were not cases of water scarcity triggering armed conflict. Furthermore, in most cases, water was only an instrument of war or a strategic target, not the objective of fighting in the first place. Further research at the University of Oregon categorized 2,000 international interactions over war and found that cooperative actions were far more prominent than conflictual ones. Cooperative water bodies have even survived conflict and war between water-sharing countries in various parts of Asia (such as during the Vietnam War). It turns out that violent conflict specifically over water is a fairly rare and isolated phenomenon. Democratic regimes, international trade relations, and membership of cooperative international institutions all reduce the likelihood of conflict. This “democratic peace thesis” should not prompt a Pollyanna vision of the future, but it should tame fears about the likelihood of climate change driving conflict.

Cooperation rather than violent conflict Research on this subject has contributed significantly to bringing such assertions back to reality. Statistical analyses of international and civil wars show that water scarcity is not a relevant variable for predicting this extreme form of conflict. Several research groups, including my own, have also examined the scale of conflict and cooperation over water resources on an international and national level. Studies such as these analyze a vast number of worldwide media reports. The single most important conclusion is that social and political interactions around water resources adhere to a kind of normal distribution. Water conflicts that are fought out violently are extremely rare. No international or domestic water wars were observed in the available data dating back to the 1940s. On the other hand, water conflicts in the form of verbal disputes are relatively common. More common, however, are interactions of a cooperative nature. In other words, water scarcity more often leads to cooperation than to conflict.

A direct by-product of the current limited thinking has been the increasing focus on ‘water wars’ between countries because of lack of water. This thinking is both linear and wrong. Simply put, the thinking goes that as countries run out of water because of steadily increasing demand, they may go to war over water over the uses and allocations of transboundary river waters. This unwarranted preoccupation with water wars can be seen by simply referring to Google. As of 20 June, ‘water scarcity’ produces 34.2 million results, and ‘water wars’, 654 million – almost 20 times as many. In fact, an eminent development expert, Ismail Serageldin (2009/2010), former vice president of the World Bank and chairman of the Global Water Partnership, predicted in 1995 that ‘the wars of the next century will be about water.’

The fact is that in the entirety of human history, no two countries have ever gone to war over water. The price of water all over the world is very low, and there is no global market or trade for water, unless one considers bottled water, which represents a miniscule fraction of global water use. All countries are steadily realizing that they have to significantly improve their management practices to reduce the demand for all types of water uses and to control water contamination. No country can increase water availability progressively, constantly and cost-effectively ad infinitum. If countries make determined and sustained efforts to improve water management practices, and there are signs that some are gradually doing so, their water problems can be solved. As Biswas (2006) noted in his Stockholm Water Prize Lecture, ‘if ever there is a war between two countries, it will never be because of water. Perhaps the 10th or 15th reason for the war could be water, but not the first three’. In the future, countries will have to manage their water significantly better, because they will have no other choice. ‘Water wars’ is a myth that has been around for at least four decades. There are no signs that they will occur in the foreseeable future anywhere in the world.

One major failing of catastrophe scenarios is that they discount the robustness and resilience of modern economies. These economies present multiple targets and configurations; they are harder to damage through cyberattack than they look, given the growing (albeit incomplete) attention to cybersecurity; and experience shows that people compensate for damage and quickly repair or rebuild. This was one of the counterintuitive lessons of the Strategic Bombing Survey. Pre-war planning assumed that civilian morale and production would crumple under aerial bombardment. In fact, the opposite occurred. Resistance hardened and production was restored.1

The study, by the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-funded research organization, finds that existing technology can protect various components of the electric grid to buffer it from the effects of solar flares, lightning strikes, and an EMP from a nuclear blast all at the same time: a three-for-one surge protector. “We have a strong technical basis for what the impacts [of an EMP] might be,” says Randy Horton, EPRI project manager and author of the report being released today. “That is one thing that didn’t exist before.”

Horton says that EPRI technicians worked with experts at the Department of Energy labs at Los Alamos and Sandia to simulate some effects of an EMP on substations and distribution systems. They also did real-world testing of electrical equipment at an EPRI laboratory in Charlotte, North Carolina. The study, which took three years to complete, looks at the effects of three kinds of energy spawned by a nuclear detonation.

The US electric grid is not about to go down. Though it’s understandable if someone believed that. Over the last few weeks, numerous media reports suggest state-backed hackers have infiltrated the US electric grid and are capable of manipulating the flow of electricity on a grand scale and cause chaos. Threats against industrial sectors including electric utilities, oil and gas, and manufacturing are growing, and it’s reasonable for people to be concerned. But to say hackers have invaded the US electric grid and are prepared to cause blackouts is false. The initial reporting stemmed from a public Department of Homeland Security (DHS) presentation in July on Russian hacking activity targeting US electric utilities. This presentation contained previously-reported information on a group known as Dragonfly by Symantec and which Dragos associates to activity labeled DYMALLOY and ALLANITE. These groups focus on information gathering from industrial control system (ICS) networks and have not demonstrated disruptive or damaging capabilities. While some news reports cite 2015 and 2016 blackouts in Ukraine as evidence of hackers’ disruptive capabilities, DYMALLOY nor ALLANITE were involved in those incidents and it is inaccurate to suggest the DHS’s public presentation and those destructive behaviors are linked. Adversaries have not placed “cyber implants” into the electric grid to cause blackouts; but they are infiltrating business networks – and in some cases, ICS networks – in an effort to steal information and intelligence to potentially gain access to operational systems. Overall, the activity is concerning and represents the prerequisites towards a potential future disruptive event – but evidence to date does not support the claim that such an attack is imminent. The US electric grid is resilient and segmented, and although it makes an interesting plot to an action movie, one or two strains of malware targeting operational networks would not cause widespread blackouts. A destructive incident at one site would require highly-tailored tools and operations and would not effectively scale. Essentially, localized impacts are possible, and asset owners and operators should work to defend their networks from intrusions such as those described by DHS. But scaling up from isolated events to widespread impacts is highly unlikely.

The likelihood that anyone outside a war zone will be killed by an Islamist extremist terrorist is extremely small. In the United States, for example, some six people have perished each year since 9/11 at the hands of such terrorists—for an annual fatality rate of about one in 50 million for the period.

This might be taken to suggest, as one writer has characterized it, that “terrorism is such a minor threat to American life and limb that it’s simply bizarre—just stupefyingly irrational and intellectually unserious—to suppose that it could even begin to justify the abolition of privacy rights as they have been traditionally understood in favour of the installation of a panoptic surveillance state.” 1 And terrorism specialist Marc Sageman characterizes the threat terrorists present in the United States as “rather negligible.” 2 The vast majority of what is commonly tallied as terrorism has occurred in war zones, and this is especially true for fatalities.3 But even this has been exaggerated by conflating terrorism with war: civil war violence that would previously have been seen to be acts of insurgency are now often labeled terrorism.4