Author Archives: Emil8up51

Hilarious White House Memo In 1995: "Hillary Could Speak To Young Women Through Internet"

by Emil8up51 Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Bill Clinton’s presidential library released 4,000 previously secret documents from his time as president. An August 31, 1995, memo titled “HRC Media Possibilities” written by Lisa Caputo, an aide to Hillary Clinton, discusses the various venues through which to promote the First Lady. They include meeting with the editors of women’s and liberal magazines, sitting for interviews pegged to the Clintons’ 20th anniversary and the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, and even making an appearance on the popular ABC sitcom Home Improvement. (“I know this may sound like a wild idea, but I think it is an interesting one to discuss.”)

The otherwise sober memo takes an unexpectedly funny turn, however, when the Internet comes up. Or, as Caputo refers to it, “Internet.” As in: “As Karen has said, Internet has become a very popular mode of communication. Hillary could speak to young women through Internet.”

Here’s an except from the memo:

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Hilarious White House Memo In 1995: "Hillary Could Speak To Young Women Through Internet"

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Meet the Journalist Spreading Michael Hastings Conspiracy Theories

by Emil8up51 Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Los Angeles Police Department has ruled out foul play in journalist Michael Hastings’ fatal car crash two months ago in Hollywood, but several media outlets are continuing to promote conspiracy theories about the circumstances surrounding his death. The theories, which suggest Hastings was assassinated shortly after sending friends a frantic email, have received attention beyond the usual fringe suspects partly because of ongoing reporting by freelance blogger Kimberly Dvorak for the CW Television Network affiliate San Diego 6.

Dvorak, whom the station touts as an “investigative journalist,” is a “National Homeland Security Correspondent” for Examiner.com, a blog network owned by Republican billionaire Philip Anschutz that has minimal editorial oversight. Since Hastings’ death, San Diego 6 has repeatedly given Dvorak airtime to float conspiracy theories—that the crash was not consistent with a car accident, that Hastings was cremated to cover-up foul play, that federal officials may have ordered him killed. None of these theories, which often come from unnamed sources, are backed up by convincing evidence, but reputable media outlets keep falling for Dvorak’s reporting anyway.

Last month, for example, the Independent, a major British newspaper, picked up Dvorak’s report claiming that Hastings’ body “was cremated and it wasn’t the request of the family…in fact, the family wanted Michael’s body to go home.” But on Tuesday, veteran journalist Russ Baker dispelled the myth on his news site WhoWhatWhy by talking to a family member who confirmed that the cremation was done at the family’s request. Dvorak later removed the passage saying Hastings’ family wanted his body to “go home,” but her story still hints at a cover-up, calling the cremation a “macabre twist.”

Dvorak’s other theories are just as questionable. She claimed on air that the engine of Hastings’ Mercedes C250 coupe had been found behind the crash site, which would have been impossible with the forward velocity of an ordinary accident. The engine was found in front of the crash site. Her suggestion that a grainy video of the crash showed evidence of a “pre-explosion” sabotage has been dismissed by car experts. She has also reported that the intensity of the resulting fire might suggest the use of thermite accelerants—a popular theory among 9/11 truthers who believe thermite was used to melt the World Trade Center towers’ steel columns. She’s written credulously about the theory that President Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States. And Dvorak has repeated speculation by Richard Clarke, the former Bush and Clinton-era counterterrorism czar, that Hastings’ car’s computer system may have been remotely hacked—something that’s technically possible but highly unlikely.

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Meet the Journalist Spreading Michael Hastings Conspiracy Theories

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Illegal Monsanto GMO wheat found in Oregon

by Emil8up51 Posted on May 30, 2013

Illegal Monsanto GMO wheat found in Oregon

By John Upton

Shutterstock

A farmer in Oregon found a patch of wheat growing like a weed where it wasn’t expected, so the farmer sprayed it with the herbicide Roundup. Surprisingly, some of the wheat survived.

The startled farmer sent samples of the renegade wheat to a laboratory, which confirmed something that should have been impossible: The wheat was a genetically engineered variety that had never been approved to be grown in the U.S., nor anywhere else in the world.

From The New York Times:

The Agriculture Department said the wheat was of the type developed by Monsanto to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup, also known as glyphosate. Such wheat was field-tested in 16 states, including Oregon, from 1998 through 2005, but Monsanto dropped the project before the wheat was ever approved for commercial planting.

The department said it was not known yet whether any of the wheat got into the food supply or into grain shipments. Even if it did, officials said, it would pose no threat to health. The Food and Drug Administration reviewed the wheat and found no safety problems with it in 2004.

Still, the mere presence of the genetically modified plant could cause some countries to turn away exports of American wheat, especially if any traces of the unapproved grain were found in shipments. About $8.1 billion in American wheat was exported in 2012, representing nearly half the total $17.9 billion crop, according to U.S. Wheat Associates, which promotes American wheat abroad. About 90 percent of Oregon’s wheat crop is exported.

It’s not clear when the discovery was made. In a statement on its website, Monsanto said it was contacted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding its investigation “earlier this month.” The USDA announced the discovery on Wednesday and said nine investigators are trying to figure out how the freak wheat wound up growing on the unnamed farmer’s land. Reuters reports that there were eight field trials of Monsanto’s GMO wheat in Oregon from 1999 to 2001.

While the federal government and agriculture industry scramble to investigate and manage fallout from the escaped wheat strain, there is one company that doesn’t seem too concerned. You can guess who that might be. From a statement posted on Monsanto’s website:

Over the past decade, an annual average of 58 million acres of wheat have been planted in the United States. This is the first report of the Roundup Ready trait being found out of place since Monsanto’s commercial wheat development program was discontinued nine years ago. …

Accordingly, while USDA’s results are unexpected, there is considerable reason to believe that the presence of the Roundup Ready trait in wheat, if determined to be valid, is very limited.

Well, if it’s “very limited,” then, I suppose there’s no need for concern. Try telling that to America’s wheat trading partners.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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blogs about ecology

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Illegal Monsanto GMO wheat found in Oregon

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Mark Zuckerberg’s political group funds ads promoting Keystone and ANWR drilling

by Emil8up51 Posted on April 26, 2013

Mark Zuckerberg’s political group funds ads promoting Keystone and ANWR drilling

By Lisa Hymas

TechCrunch

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

ThinkProgress has the story:

Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, which bills itself as a bipartisan entity dedicated to passing immigration reform, has spent considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes — including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and constructing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The umbrella group, co-founded by Facebook’s Zuckerberg, NationBuilder’s Joe Green, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, and others in the tech industry, is called FWD.US. …

FWD.US is bankrolling two subsidiary organizations to purchase TV ads to advance the overarching agenda — one run by veteran Republican political operatives and one led by Democratic strategists.

Both of those subsidiary groups have put out ads that praise efforts to expand the oil industry — by expanding offshore oil drilling and well as building Keystone XL and opening up ANWR. The ads don’t even mention immigration, but instead “appear to be trying to give political cover to vulnerable centrists, in hopes of ensuring their support for major immigration reform,” ThinkProgress writes.

So much for all that talk about shifting from an old, dirty, fossil-fuel-driven economy to a new, clean, knowledge-based one.

Source

Mark Zuckerberg’s New Political Group Spending Big On Ads Supporting Keystone XL And Oil Drilling, ThinkProgress

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Mark Zuckerberg’s political group funds ads promoting Keystone and ANWR drilling

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Fracking drives potentially explosive demand for potentially explosive ammonia factories

by Emil8up51 Posted on April 20, 2013

Fracking drives potentially explosive demand for potentially explosive ammonia factories

By John Upton

Shutterstock

The U.S. could soon be home to a lot more ammonia factories — not a comforting thought after a deadly explosion at an ammonia fertilizer plant in Texas on Wednesday evening. You can blame the fracking boom.

Ammonia is used to produce fertilizer, industrial explosives (like those used in mining), plastics, and other products. It’s becoming cheaper to produce in the U.S. because one of its main feedstocks is natural gas, and natural gas, in case you haven’t heard, is being fracked here at a breakneck pace and sold for bargain-basement prices.

Australian company Incitec Pivot this week announced [PDF] that it will be building a hulking new $850 million ammonia facility in Waggaman, La., just outside New Orleans. Construction could begin within six weeks, with the plant expected to come online in 2016. The announcement is being characterized by Australia’s media as a blow for the manufacturing sector Down Under, but Incitec Pivot can’t resist the siren song of cheap American natural gas.

From Australia’s The Age:

[Incitec Pivot] Chief executive James Fazzino said the boom in shale had enabled a “step change” in US gas prices.

“[The plant] takes our North American business and any future expansions back to US gas economics,” he said. “This is vital to this project because 80 per cent of the cost of making ammonia is gas.”

He’s not the only one who’s smelling opportunity. U.S.-based Mosaic announced in December that it may build a $700 million ammonia plant in St. James Parish, La. U.S.-based CHS Inc. said in September that it would construct a $1.2 billion ammonia plant in North Dakota. Also in September, Egypt’s largest company, Orascom Construction, said it would spend $1.4 billion to build a fertilizer plant in Iowa.

ICIS, a news source for the petrochemical industry, explains the trend:

Nitrogen fertilizer production in the US was in a state of decline, but is now in a period of transition. After 20 years of rising raw material costs and players closing and relocating plants, there is renewed impetus among domestic producers to invest in their own country.

Rather than looking to other regions, producers of ammonia and urea are eyeing new opportunities on US shores for the first time since the 1990s. According to engineering contractor ThyssenKrupp Uhde, this is the dawn of a new era with plenty of opportunity.

“The high demand for fertilizer plants in the US is clearly a consequence of the shale gas boom,” says Klaus Noelker, head of process department for ThyssenKrupp Uhde’s Ammonia and Urea Division.

The history of ammonia production and storage is littered with spectacular accidents. The owners of the Texas facility had previously assured regulators that their operation posed no serious safety risks. From The Dallas Morning News:

West Fertilizer Co. reported having as much as 54,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia on hand in an emergency planning report required of facilities that use toxic or hazardous chemicals.

But the report … stated “no” under fire or explosive risks. The worst possible scenario, the report said, would be a 10-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one. The second worst possibility projected was a leak from a broken hose used to transfer the product, again causing no injuries.

The new planned ammonia facilities will be a lot bigger than the one in West, Texas. Here’s hoping they’ll also be a lot safer.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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blogs about ecology

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

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Fracking drives potentially explosive demand for potentially explosive ammonia factories

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Let’s Spend Some Money and Find Out Once and for All Whether Chained CPI Cheats the Elderly

by Emil8up51 Posted on April 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Measuring inflation is really hard. Products sprout new features, quality goes up and down, and consumer tastes change. A banana today might be the same as a banana ten years ago, but if you buy a car, a computer, or an iPod, how do you even begin to compare it to a basket of goods you might have purchased ten years ago? At times, it’s a question that becomes almost metaphysical.

The boffins at the BLS spend a lot of time trying to figure this stuff out, and some time ago they decided that their classic CPI measurement probably wasn’t accurate. It was overstating actual inflation because it didn’t properly account for the fact that people change their buying habits when prices go up. If beef gets more expensive, for example, people buy more chicken. So if you just blindly plug the increased price of beef into your spreadsheet, you’ll end up generating an inflation number that doesn’t accurately reflect the actual consumption patterns of ordinary consumers.

To fix this, about a decade ago the BLS began tracking a measure called chained CPI. But there’s yet another problem with measuring inflation: it’s different for different groups of people. If you’re a child and you spend half your income on comic books, a rise in the price of comic books represents a gigantic increase in the inflation rate. For adults, not so much.

So if we switch to a new measure of CPI, it’s likely to affect different groups of people differently. In particular, although adopting chained CPI as the new official measure of inflation would more accurately reflect inflation for consumers who have a lot of freedom to change their buying patterns, it might be less accurate for consumers who are more constrained. One example of a group that’s more constrained is the elderly. Bob Greenstein acknowledges this in a short note that tots up the pros and cons of adopting chained CPI:

Most analysts who have studied the issue have concluded that the chained CPI — which has risen about one-quarter of a percentage point more slowly per year than the regular CPI over the last ten years — more accurately measures overall inflation than the regular CPI. But that judgment applies to the population as a whole. The chained CPI probably does not more accurately measure inflation for the elderly; in fact, it may well be less accurate.

This was a long windup to get to a simple question: Why only “probably”? Why don’t we know whether chained CPI is more accurate for the elderly? This has been a significant issue for years, since it directly impacts annual COLA increases for Social Security recipients. If chained CPI is more accurate even for the elderly, there’s good reason to adopt it. If it’s less accurate—because seniors spend a big chunk of their income on housing and medical care, and have little freedom to change that—then it would effectively produce COLA increases that didn’t keep up with inflation as experienced by seniors.

So why don’t we know? The BLS has an experimental measure called CPI-E that tries to measure consumer prices for the elderly, but it has a number of flaws and shows inconclusive results. And anyway, it reflects only the different buying patterns of the elderly, not whether chaining would unfairly assume that those buying patterns are more variable than they really are.

I assume it would cost a few million dollars to conduct a full-scale study of the effect of chained CPI on the elderly. But the effect on the elderly amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. So what’s stopping us from putting in the time and money it would take to find out for sure?

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Let’s Spend Some Money and Find Out Once and for All Whether Chained CPI Cheats the Elderly

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In Honor of Buzz Bissinger, Strange Fashion Longreads

by Emil8up51 Posted on March 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, Friday Night Lights creator and journalist Buzz Bissinger set the internet on fire with a candid, 6,000-word confessional about his out-of-control addiction to high-end shopping published in GQ.

Bissinger’s obsession—forty-one pairs of leather pants? A $22,000 jacket?—is so outlandish that it almost seems like a rouse. Yet there are many more weird stories woven into what we wear, why we wear it, and what happens to it when we clean out the closet.

For more MoJo staffers’ long-form favorites, visit our longreads.com page. Take a look at some of our own reporters’ longreads here and follow @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter for the latest.

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In Honor of Buzz Bissinger, Strange Fashion Longreads

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WATCH: Deficit Hawkman Returns! Fiore Cartoon

by Emil8up51 Posted on March 23, 2013

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Deficit Hawkman Returns! Fiore Cartoon

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The Chinese Bond Meme That Refuses to Die

by Emil8up51 Posted on February 28, 2013

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Robert Solow had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday “emphasizing six facts about the debt that many Americans may not be aware of.” For example, half our debt is owned by foreigners; it’s owed in dollars, which is our own currency; and while this debt could spark inflation and soak up private savings that would otherwise go into useful investment, that’s not going to happen in a weak economy like the one we have now. CFR president Richard Haass tweets that Solow isn’t pessimistic enough about rising interest rates and the “ability of a hostile foreign govt to pressure US,” but Dan Drezner thinks that, if anything, Solow is painting too grim a picture:

As for Haass, I’m not exactly sure what “rising rates” he’s talking about, as just about any chart you can throw up shows historically low borrowing rates for the United States government. Indeed, the U.S. Treasury is exploiting this fact by locking in U.S. long-term debt at these rates. As for foreign governments pressuring the United States, the fear of foreign financial statecraft has been overly hyped by the foreign policy community. And by “overly hyped,” I mean “wildly, massively overblown.”

The bias in foreign policy circles and DC punditry is to bemoan staggering levels of U.S. debt. This bias does percolate down into the perceptions of ordinary Americans, which leads to wild misperceptions about the actual state of the U.S. economy and U.S. economic power. I’d like to see a lot more op-eds by Solow et al that puncture these myths more effectively.

This claim that China will be able to blackmail or extort America because of all the U.S. debt it owns is a zombie idea that just won’t die. The truth is that China’s holdings of U.S. treasuries give it no leverage to speak of; pose no danger to America; and China’s recent actions demonstrate pretty conclusively that they know this perfectly well. Hell, China’s share of U.S. debt has gone down for the past two years. This whole meme really needs to die.

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The Chinese Bond Meme That Refuses to Die

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