Author Archives: Shelby Morris

Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

by Shelby Morris Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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In 2011, after Republicans in Congress introduced a bill that would ban taxpayer funding for abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” Democrats adopted a new line of attack: the GOP was waging a “war on women.” Instead of changing their policies, Republicans changed the subject, arguing that the sexual behavior of individual Democratic politicians—such as Anthony Weiner—proves the GOP “war on women” is a fiction.

On Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) became the latest GOPer to adopt this strategy, arguing on Meet the Press that former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky means Democrats are in no place to cry foul about the Republican party platform.

Paul made the comments after host David Gregory highlighted a moment in a September Vogue profile of Paul in which Kelley Paul, the senator’s wife, said, “Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky should complicate his return to the White House, even as first spouse. I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women.”

Gregory asked Paul if Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the White House would be fair game in a 2016 race involving Hillary Clinton. Here’s Paul’s response:

I mean, the Democrats, one of their big issues is they have concocted and said Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office.

And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and that is predatory behavior, and it should be something we shouldn’t want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl in his office.

This isn’t having an affair. I mean, this isn’t me saying, “Oh, he’s had an affair, we shouldn’t talk to him.” Someone who takes advantage of a young girl in their office? I mean, really. And then they have the gall to stand up and say, “Republicans are having a war on women”?

When Democrats say there’s a “war on women,” they are not criticizing the personal conduct of GOP lawmakers. They’re talking about Republican policymakers’ sustained attacks on women’s reproductive rights. It’s hard to see what Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct tells us about today’s battles over reproductive rights policy—especially when he hasn’t held elected office for nearly fourteen years.

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Rand Paul: There’s No GOP War on Women, But Remember the Lewinsky Scandal?

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Is Ezra Klein the Next Roger Ailes?

by Shelby Morris Posted on January 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Andrew Sullivan today:

I have to say it’s been amazing to see Washington get almost giddy about the Ezra Klein story. Well, maybe only Washington journalists … but, still….All the stories about these ventures rightly take a wait-and-see approach as to whether we are witnessing a realignment in which those old big media companies accelerate their decline by being unable to accommodate their new media stars … or whether these new ventures will eventually founder in a grim business climate for journalism. These new models may be evanescent or central to the future. We just don’t know yet.

This is true: we don’t know yet. At the same time, no one should feel like this is something new and unprecedented. It’s the same thing that’s been happening to popular media for over a century. When radio was invented, it attracted young entrepreneurs like William Paley (using family money) and Richard Sarnoff (working his way up the ranks at RCA). The burgeoning market for middle-class reading material attracted young entrepreneurs like Henry Luce (magazines), William Randolph Hearst (newspapers), and Simon & Schuster (books). The film industry attracted young entrepreneurs like Walt Disney and Howard Hughes. Cheap four-color printing prompted Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson to start up the company that would later become DC Comics. Car culture produced car magazines. Computers produced computer magazines. Gaming produced gaming magazines. The rise of cable TV brought us CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. When politics collided with the rise of the internet, we got websites like Drudge Report, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and Politico.

Will Ezra Klein’s new venture succeed? Who knows. But I think it’s safe to say that some of these ventures will succeed, and they will indeed produce a realignment in the political media universe. They already have, after all: Fox News and Politico are probably more influential already than the entire old-guard newspaper industry combined.

Young (and some not-so-young) entrepreneurs have been reshaping popular media forever. It’s no surprise that this is continuing. What else would you expect, after all?

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Is Ezra Klein the Next Roger Ailes?

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It’s Time to Think Harder About Income Inequality

by Shelby Morris Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at the Prospect, David Callahan writes that a new critique of rising income inequality is starting to get some attention. It doesn’t rely on arguments about fairness, but on arguments that high income inequality hurts economic growth:

This argument follows a simple causal chain: unequal growth concentrates wealth in the hands of a tiny slice of consumers who can only spend so much money. In turn, the vast majority of earners are left with little extra cash for goods and services. Resulting weak demand undermines growth. Low growth makes everyone poorer than they otherwise might be, including those who own the means of production. Inequality produces other bad economic outcomes, too, such as the underutilization of the nation’s human capital, inadequate public investment in both human and physical capital, and social ills that are costly to address, diverting away resources from investment.

The basic idea here is that low and middle-income people spend most of their income, while rich people spend only a fraction of what they earn. So if the rich get a bigger share of total income, then total consumption goes down and the economy flounders. Here’s a simple example to give you an idea of how this works. Suppose a country has a total income of $1,000. Furthermore, rich people spend half the money they make while everyone else spends their entire income:

Bottom 99 percent receives $900 of income and spends all $900.
Top 1 percent receives $100 of income and spends $50.
Grand total consumption = $950.

Now suppose that income inequality goes up:

Bottom 99 percent receives $800 of income and spends $800.
Top 1 percent receives $200 of income and spends $100.
Grand total consumption = $900.

This makes a lot of intuitive sense. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t really seem to support it. “I’ve been surprised at just how much the rich can spend,” said Jared Bernstein, former chief economist to Joe Biden, when I called to ask him about this last year. He’s a pretty progressive guy, but he just didn’t think there was much convincing research to back this theory.

However, there are some other theories that strike me as better grounded. One theory suggests that as inequality goes up, the rich save more and the middle class borrows more, eventually causing an economic crisis when the debt bubble bursts. There’s also an argument that rising inequality leads to the financialization of an economy, which produces economic instability. Or that rising inequality produces political instability as the rich gain more and more influence on the levers of politics. Or that inequality leads to poorer educational opportunities for the middle class, which in turn produces low growth.

Are any of these correct? I happen to particularly believe the first one might be, but the plain truth is that it’s still pretty speculative. You can state the thesis in a few paragraphs (simple example here, more scholarly example here), and that’s about all there is to say about it. To go further, we need evidence, and this is why all of us on the left should be pleased at the founding of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which is dedicated to commissioning serious research on the causes of inequality and how they relate to economic growth.

For myself, I’ll happily continue to favor lower levels of inequality purely for reasons of basic fairness and human decency. It’s just flatly obscene for the top 10 percent to be hoovering up nearly all the fruits of economic growth while everyone else stagnates. I can’t think of any reason why anyone would consider this an acceptable state of affairs. Nonetheless, as Callahan notes, that’s not enough for most people. If we want to convince them that this is a problem worth addressing, we need other arguments.

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It’s Time to Think Harder About Income Inequality

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NSA Apparently Surveils About 0.01 Percent of Foreign Facebook Accounts

by Shelby Morris Posted on June 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tech companies, under pressure from foreign users who want to know if their accounts are routinely under surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies, have been begging the federal government to allow them to release general figures on how many FISA requests they get. The feds haven’t allowed them to do that yet, but they have allowed them to release a bit of information:

Over the last six months of 2012, Facebook said, it had received as many as 10,000 requests from local, state and federal agencies, which impacted as many as 19,000 accounts. Facebook has 1.1 billion accounts worldwide. Microsoft said that it received between 6,000 and 7,000 similar requests, affecting as many as 32,000 accounts.

The companies said some of the requests were for terrorism investigations. But others were from a local sheriff asking for data to locate a missing child or from federal marshals tracking fugitives. From these statements, it was impossible to ascertain the scale of the FISA requests made by the National Security Agency.

….That the company would rush to release a figure that gives the public little idea of the scale of the FISA requests is a sign of the pressure it has been under since the PRISM program was made public.

I’m not surprised at all that Facebook and Microsoft rushed to release this information. Their motivation is simple: they want to demonstrate that they aren’t providing NSA with broad access to every foreign account holder in their systems, and even this partial release pretty much does that. In Facebook’s case, they get requests covering about 38,000 accounts per year, which suggests that FISA warrants cover maybe 30,000 accounts or so, most of them foreign. At a rough guess, Facebook has about 900 million non-U.S. accounts, of which perhaps half are truly active. This means that NSA surveils about .01 percent of their active foreign accounts each year. There’s obviously some guesswork in this estimate, but I think it gets us in the right ballpark.

The fact that Facebook and others have begged the government to allow them to release more detailed information is a clue all by itself that the number of surveilled accounts isn’t huge. If they were handing over data on millions of accounts, they wouldn’t be eager for the world to know it.

However, it’s worth noting that Google hasn’t yet made this partial information public, saying that they wanted to wait until they could release more detailed breakdowns. This might be genuine on their part, or it could suggest that the raw number of warrants served to Google is more dramatic than it is for Facebook or Microsoft. After all, Gmail might be a lot more interesting to NSA than a Facebook timeline. We’ll have to wait and see.

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NSA Apparently Surveils About 0.01 Percent of Foreign Facebook Accounts

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Monsanto says opponents may be to blame for GMO wheat escape

by Shelby Morris Posted on June 6, 2013

Monsanto says opponents may be to blame for GMO wheat escape

By John Upton

Shutterstock

A week after word got out that unapproved GMO wheat was found growing on an Oregon farm, Monsanto has announced the results of an internal investigation into the mysterious outbreak. The results can be summarized thusly: “Nothing is wrong at our end and everybody’s crops are safe. Maybe our opponents planted our freak wheat to try to hurt us.”

From the Associated Press:

A genetically modified test strain of wheat that emerged to the surprise of an Oregon farmer last month was likely the result of an accident or deliberate mixing of seeds, the company that developed it said Wednesday.

Representatives for Monsanto Co. said during a conference call Wednesday that the emergence of the genetically modified strain was an isolated occurrence. It has tested the original wheat stock and found it clean, the company said.

Sabotage is a possibility, said Robb Fraley, Monsanto chief technology officer.

“We’re considering all options and that’s certainly one of the options,” Fraley said.

Sabotage aside, many scientists aren’t buying the company’s assurances that there’s no reason to worry about GMO wheat infecting the food supply. From Bloomberg:

Monsanto said that it has since [last week] tested 31,200 seed samples in Oregon and Washington and found no evidence of contamination.

That’s not enough to convince some researchers that this genetic modification, not cleared for commercial sale, won’t be found in some wheat seeds.

“We don’t know where in the whole chain it is,” said Carol Mallory-Smith, the weed science professor at Oregon State University who tested the initial wheat plants and determined they were a genetic variety Monsanto had tested. “I don’t know how Monsanto can declare anything. We obviously had these plants in the field.” …

“Sure they tested it, but that doesn’t mean it’s all clean,” David Andow, a professor of entomology at the University of Minnesota, said in an interview. “It just means it’s not so widespread that it could be detected easily.”

Although it’s been widely reported that Monsanto ended field trials of its genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat in 2005, we recently shared the news that the company resumed such field trials in 2011.

So, even while Monsanto is deliberately planting its deeply unpopular GMO wheat on test plots in two states, its officials are suggesting, without any evidence, that the company’s opponents — people who oppose or even fear GMO crops — are responsible for the rogue outbreak in Oregon. Right.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Smithfield, world’s largest pork producer, could be sold to a Chinese company

by Shelby Morris Posted on May 30, 2013

Smithfield, world’s largest pork producer, could be sold to a Chinese company

By Claire Thompson

Shutterstock

In Smithfield, Va., on Wednesday, locals were shocked to discover that their town’s namesake, Smithfield Foods, founded in 1936 as a single meatpacking plant and now the largest pork producer in the world, is poised to be sold to Chinese meat company Shuanghui International. If approved by federal regulators, the $4.7 billion deal would be the biggest takeover in history of an American company by a Chinese one.

The announcement of the deal immediately provoked skepticism far beyond the town of Smithfield, with a wide range of camps voicing concern about everything from food safety to foreign financial control to increasing corporate consolidation of the food industry. Shuanghui is the biggest meat company in China, and Smithfield already owns more hogs than the next eight largest hog producers combined, according to Food & Water Watch. It’s not necessarily a complete foreign takeover if you consider that Shuanghui is partially owned by Goldman Sachs, but if you’re worried about corporate control of the food system, that’s not exactly cause for comfort.

Why is China interested in owning an American pork behemoth? The New York Times reports:

Smithfield and Shuanghui said that the deal was meant to … increase exports of American products to China, already the nation’s third-largest export market for pork. Meat consumption in China has exploded over the past decade because of a growing middle class and a shift in diet from rice and vegetables to more protein.

China has attempted to meet that rising demand for a middle-class diet by revamping its meat-production system to look more like the industrial one dominant in the U.S. and exemplified by Smithfield. Large, vertically integrated agribusiness operations, supported by policy and investment, increasingly challenge the survival of small-scale Chinese farms, according to a 2011 paper from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The shift toward industrial agriculture, while successfully ramping up Chinese pork production, has also led to food-safety scandals that have American consumer groups worried about the possibility of China exporting its pork to the U.S., despite the deal’s stated goal of doing the opposite. In 2011, Shuanghui came under fire for selling pork tainted with clenbuterol, an additive banned in the U.S., E.U., and China itself for its serious human health risks. And then there was that whole problem of Chinese hog farmers dumping thousands of dead pigs in a river.

But it’s not like U.S.-produced pork has a stellar safety record. A report earlier this month from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Inspector General slammed slaughterhouses here for “egregious” safety violations; it found that producers often committed the same human-health and animal-welfare errors over and over without consequence. And American pork producers, including Smithfield, have faced criticism for their use of ractopamine, an additive similar to clenbuterol that’s banned in China but not here. According to Reuters, Smithfield has been trying to phase out the drug; the deal with a Chinese company could speed up that process.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a panel that clears such deals for national security, must review the deal before it can go ahead. Tom Philpott at Mother Jones has this take:

For Smithfield itself, the deal is savvy, because Americans are eating less meat. In order to maintain endless profit growth, the company needs to conquer markets where per capita meat consumption is growing fast, and the China market itself represents the globe’s biggest prize in that regard.

Hmm. Reminds me of U.S. attempts to export another product unwanted by Americans but in high demand in China. Starts with c, rhymes with bowl.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Are You Ready for Talking Tissues?

by Shelby Morris Posted on May 6, 2013

Dale O.

on

We Can’t Change the Facts: Cats Need Meat

38 minutes ago

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Keystone XL protestor cleverly disrupts Valero golf tournament, explains how he did it

by Shelby Morris Posted on April 11, 2013

Keystone XL protestor cleverly disrupts Valero golf tournament, explains how he did it

By John Upton

Jeez, it seems a wealthy white dude can’t even flick mindlessly between Fox News and golf broadcasts these days without being rudely interrupted by a message about the evils of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Last week at the Texas Open, a professional golf tournament sponsored by oil giant Valero, one of the signs being held by volunteer Doug Fahlbusch was changed at the 18th hole from stating players’ names and scores to reveal this message: “TAR SANDS SPILL. ANSWER MANCHESTER.”

Tar Sands Blockade

Some of the tar-sands oil that would be piped to the Gulf Coast by Keystone XL would be processed by Valero in Houston’s East End, which includes the neighborhood of Manchester, where pollution from industrial operations has long sickened residents.

As you can imagine, Fahlbusch’s statement caused quite the kerfuffle among hoity-toity golf officials and he was carried away by security and arrested by police. Watch the video below and you’ll see one security guard is particularly anxious to wrestle the dastardly sign from the protestor’s hand, even as he is being carried away, perhaps worried that the offensive message might hurt the innocent eyes of any women or children. Which is not bloody likely, given that most golf fans are wealthy middle-aged white men.

A Platts energy blogger was stunned by the organization required to pull off such a stunt. Stunned! From his post:

Think about how this must have occurred. This individual, Douglas Fahlbusch, had to answer the call for volunteers to serve the tournament. These sorts of positions are generally filled by people who like to be out on the course, surrounded by some of the world’s best players. …

Presumably, Fahlbusch needed to pass some sort of background check, though it couldn’t have been too rigorous if the organizers missed the fact that he appears to be a dedicated anti-oil green.

Right, because background checks should reveal those who are “dedicated anti-oil green” activists? Perhaps they should also reveal whether somebody is a communist?

Anyway, no need for speculation, because we asked Fahlbusch for his account of the stunt. Here’s what he told us in an email, which goes to show how easy it can be to make your voice heard on this issue in a novel way, with just a little planning and persistence:

I got the “job” as standard bearer by signing up as a volunteer for the Valero open. It’s interesting, I actually had to pay $50.00 to get the volunteer opportunity. There are hundreds of volunteers and the few that I spoke with were doing it to get a “free” round of golf at the TPC San Antonio golf course. As a volunteer we also got fed each day, got a uniform, and entrance to a volunteer party Saturday night with free drinks and all! Once you sign up and pay to be a volunteer, you can pick which part of the Open to volunteer with. These jobs range from course security, VIP assistant, course marshall, crowd control, etc. I have never been a standard bearer or played golf in my life. I simply saw this event as an opportunity to put a kink in the Valero pr system and get some attention out there about the fence line community of Manchester in Houston, Texas. The Valero Texas Open has this image as a big charity event, raising $10 million or so for San Antonio charities.

I got the idea for the prank after spending some time researching the event and volunteer positions available. As the standard bearer you walk behind the golfers holding a sign that has the golfer names and scores. After I saw an image of a standard bearer, I had the light bulb moment. To prepare for the protest, I walked the golf course for 3 days as a standard bearer, something like 5 miles of walking per day. The first day, I spent some time just looking at the course for places to make a splash. I also made notes of security, and measured the sign so that I could make my own signage for the big day. It became very obvious that the 18th hole was the one, with the most spectators and media on the spot. Once I figured that out, I then spent the next two volunteer days looking for where I could make the sign switch. I guess I did ok as a standard bearer and got a couple of autographed golf balls from the Pro’s that I walked with. After volunteering all day, I went back home and made the signs that I would use for the prank. I ended up making the signs break down into 2 pieces so that I could hide them inside of my shirt. I had the signs taped together, and used an ACE bandage to wrap them to my torso to stay hidden until deployment. I made the sign switch in a bathroom on the walk between the 17th and 18th holes. I went into the bathroom, unwrapped the signs I made and slid them underneath the Valero open signs. I then made the walk with the golfers from the tee to the green on the 18th, hoping that no one would notice the second set of signs under the normal ones. As we approached the green, I altered my path towards the center of the green, pulled off the normal signs to reveal the protest signage, removed my shirt to reveal a Tar Sands Blockade t- shirt and began the protest! The protest did not last long in the end, but I do think I got the attention of the PGA and Valero.

The reason for protesting Valero is based upon their investment in the refining of Tar Sands from Canada. I have been with the Tar Sands Blockade for the last 6 months protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas and Oklahoma. I am very passionate about the issue of climate change and see the extraction of tar sands as the final straw for our planet. I plan on continuing with Tar Sands Blockade as long as possible and hope to join the fight against the northern segment of the pipeline once it is approved by Obama.

And as for the aftermath?

I was arrested. I was charged in the end with Criminal Trespass, a class B misdemeanor. Bail was set at $800.00, which was kindly paid by friends of mine. I spent around 10 hours in the Bexar county jail in San Antonio. The charge I received actually changed 3 times while I was being held in custody. Initially I was charged with disturbing the peace, but while sitting in the back of a police car at the golf course the charges were changed to resisting arrest. This was after a long huddle between a few officers that I could observe through the window of the squad car. I finally received the trespass charge after the magistrate judge looked at my case and evidence against me. The judge gave out the charges and bail, then roughly 4 hours later I was free.

Here’s that video:

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

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Michigan neighbors sue to shut down new wind farm

by Shelby Morris Posted on April 10, 2013

Michigan neighbors sue to shut down new wind farm

By John Upton

Lake Winds Energy Park

Lake Winds Energy Park sure looks peaceful, but 17 neighbors claim otherwise.

Neighbors of a 56-turbine wind farm built last year in Mason County, Mich., have filed a lawsuit claiming that the turbines have negatively affected their health and wealth and should be shut down.

The lawsuit [PDF], filed by 17 property owners in a community along the east shore of Lake Michigan, alleges that Lake Winds Energy Park keeps them awake at night and has left them fatigued and stressed, unable to concentrate properly, and stricken with headaches, dizziness, nausea, and ringing and aching in the ears. They also say it has decreased their property values. They are seeking financial payouts and a shuttering of the facility.

Power plant developer Consumers Energy told MLive that it has met all permit requirements and is working to reduce the turbines’ impacts on neighbors:

Consumers Energy is reprogramming some of its turbines to account for the possibility that “shadow flicker” — a strobe effect when sunlight passes through moving blades — may carry further than earlier models predicted. The reprogramming should be complete by Monday, April 15, the company said. Wind turbines have shadow-flicker detection systems intended to stop blades from rotating when the sun hits them at an angle that affects neighboring residents.

Once a relative anomaly on the American landscape, wind farms have been popping up all over in recent years, helping the country move away from fossil fuels.

But with the growth of the wind sector has come a growing number of complaints about the shadows, flickers, and weird pulsing noises generated by turbines. A self-published 2009 book gave birth to the term “wind turbine syndrome,” a sickness characterized by the same ailments listed in the lawsuit.

Many scientists question whether such a syndrome even exists. For a paper published in this month’s Journal of Environmental Health [PDF], researchers reviewed a number of studies on the issue and found no evidence in the scientific literature that wind turbine syndrome is real. They did, however, find that wind turbines can be seriously annoying for neighbors:

At present, a specific health condition or collection of symptoms has not been documented in the peer-reviewed, published literature that has been classified as a “disease” caused by exposure to sound levels and frequencies generated by the operation of wind turbines. It can be theorized that reported health effects are a manifestation of the annoyance that individuals experience as a result of the presence of wind turbines in their communities.

Nonetheless, complaints of this supposedly debilitating syndrome have been growing since the term was introduced, mostly afflicting residents in communities where organized campaigns have been waged in opposition to wind energy farms. That led Australian researchers to conclude recently that people who live near wind turbines are being fooled into experiencing symptoms that the turbines do not actually cause.

We wish the people of Mason County the best of health. We trust they are not feigning sickness just to shut down a clean power source that they do not like, and we hope that efforts by wind energy companies can help reduce annoyances while still delivering a steady stream of renewable energy. We need that renewable energy to escape the clutches of fossil fuels — and we all know how sick the fossil fuels have made us and our world.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

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Donglegate: How One Brogrammer’s Sexist Joke Led to Death Threats and Firings

by Shelby Morris Posted on March 22, 2013

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Another day, another boneheaded sexist misstep igniting a blamestorm in the tech world. The latest incident played out at the annual Python developer conference, which ended yesterday with multiple people getting fired, a woman of color enduring hundreds of violent and racist threats, apparent DDoS attacks knee-capping at least one website, and tech community outrage that’s attracted national attention.

It all started on Sunday at the PyCon event in Santa Clara, California, when Adria Richards, a female conference-goer and a technology consultant, overheard a conversation with a guy seated behind her at a panel. Richards claims their otherwise unremarkable techie chat turned sour when a neighboring guy joined in with a couple of jokes. They had to do with “forking” (copying someone else’s code) and “dongles” (little pieces of hardware), but in a way Richards found suggestive and inappropriate. Richards snapped a picture of the guys making the jokes, and posted it to Twitter. PlayHaven, a mobile-gaming site, confirmed to Mother Jones that both of the men photographed by Richards were PlayHaven employees at the time.

Richards also tweeted her seat location, a plea for someone to come by and talk to the guys in question, and a link to the PyCon Code of Conduct page, which defines unacceptable behavior at the conference (more on this later). Minutes later, a PyCon staffer came by and Richards spoke with him and a few other staffers in private. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. In a blog post Richards posted the next day, she writes that staffers “wanted to pull the people in question from the main ballroom” and that they were escorted out. She doesn’t mention seeing them again. It was later widely reported across Twitter and tech forums that the two guys Richards pointed out to staffers were kicked out of the conference. Not so, lead conference organizer Jesse Noller told us in an email: “They were pulled aside, spoken with, and then returned to their seats to the knowledge of the staff and myself.” Noller says no one was removed from the conference due to this incident; someone was kicked for using drugs in public, indoors, but that was two weeks ago, and no one’s been removed since.â&#128;&#139;

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Donglegate: How One Brogrammer’s Sexist Joke Led to Death Threats and Firings

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