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At Conservative Gathering, Attacks on Donald Trump Are Not Sticking

Mother Jones

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Increasingly desperate in the face of Donald Trump’s growing lead in the Republican primary contest, his opponents have begun hurling attacks at him in a last-ditch effort to stop his rise. Marco Rubio is now calling Trump a “con artist” who started a “fake university” in order to trick people into taking out loans. Ted Cruz continues to hammer at Trump for having previously been pro-choice and progressive on other issues before he decided to run for president. Mitt Romney lashed out at him on Thursday as “a phony, a fraud.” A new super-PAC dedicated to defeating Trump released an ad this week hitting the front-runner for the Trump University scam.

But attendees of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, just outside Washington, DC, say these attacks are one scam they are not going to fall for.

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At Conservative Gathering, Attacks on Donald Trump Are Not Sticking

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Are We in a New Golden Age of Journalism?

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was 1949. My mother—known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York’s girl caricaturist”—was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York’s newspapers and magazines, including the Brooklyn Eagle. That paper, then more than a century old, had just a few years of life left in it. From 1846 to 1848, its editor had been the poet Walt Whitman. In later years, my mother used to enjoy telling a story about the Eagle editor she dealt with who, on learning that I was being sent to Walt Whitman kindergarten, responded in the classically gruff newspaper manner memorialized in movies like His Girl Friday: “Are they still naming things after that old bastard?”

In my childhood, New York City was, you might say, papered with newspapers. The Daily News, the Daily Mirror, the Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal…there were perhaps nine or 10 significant ones on newsstands every day and, though that might bring to mind some golden age of journalism, it’s worth remembering that a number of them were already amalgams. The Journal-American, for instance, had once been the Evening Journal and the American, just as the World-Telegram & Sun had been a threesome, the World, the Evening Telegram, and the Sun. In my own household, we got the New York Times (disappointingly comic-strip-less), the New York Post (then a liberal, not a right-wing, rag that ran Pogo and Herblock’s political cartoons) and sometimes the Journal-American (Believe It or Not and The Phantom).

Then there were always the magazines: in our house, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Look, the New Yorker—my mother worked for some of them, too—and who knows what else in a roiling mass of print. It was a paper universe all the way to the horizon, though change and competition were in the air. After all, the screen (the TV screen, that is) was entering the American home like gangbusters. Mine arrived in 1953 when the Post assigned my mother to draw the Army-McCarthy hearings, which—something new under the sun—were to be televised live by ABC.

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Are We in a New Golden Age of Journalism?

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The KKK Leader Haunted-House Song the Late Phil Everly Never Got To Write

Mother Jones

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Phil Everly, who with his older brother Don made up the country/rock ‘n roll duo the Everly Brothers, died on Friday in Burbank, California, due to complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 74.

The Everly Brothers’ influence on popular music in the 1950s and 1960s was immense. The songs they strummed and sang (in legendary harmonies) were often big hits. During the height of their powers, they had almost three dozen hits on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, including “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love.” The Everly Brothers were among the first ten acts inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The duo influenced some of the best artists of the 20th century, such as The Beatles and The Byrds. “We owe the Everly Brothers everything,” Bob Dylan said. “They started it all.”

I’m not going to pretend that I’m capable of writing the definitive or the most comprehensive Phil Everly obituary. There are a lot of remembrances already out there, and plenty of rock historians who can tell you much more about Everly’s place in musical history than I ever could. But what I can offer is my favorite Everly story—one regarding perhaps the most brilliant song that Everly never wrote.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published in June 2013, he talks about his beautiful house outside of Nashville, Tennessee, in Maury County. It was built in 1846, and has this unique bit of history to it, according to Everly:

During the Civil War, a famous Confederate lieutenant general named Nathan Bedford Forrest had a violent argument with a lieutenant named A. Willis Gould. Words were exchanged, Gould shot Forrest in the hip, and Forrest wound up fatally stabbing him. Forrest recuperated in our bedroom. I suppose there’s a song in that story someplace.

I’m not sure if Forrest’s ghost is hanging around, but I have a theory about this house. It won’t let you do anything to the structure it doesn’t like. We had a roof leak a few years back, and the carpenter impulsively wanted to solve the problem by drilling a hole in the floor. But the bit snapped right off. The house wouldn’t let him do it. This kind of thing has happened several other times.

(For the record, Forrest died in Memphis, but let’s just say it’s plausible that this Confederate ghost could find its way back to this estate.)

The idea for a Nathan Bedford Forrest death-match / freaky haunted-house country-rock song is even more interesting when you consider that Forrest was also the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the namesake of Forrest Gump, and an accused war criminal. Under Forrest’s command, Confederate troops carried out the atrocity at Fort Pillow, where hundreds of surrendered black soldiers were slaughtered.

So who knows if he was being serious about this song. I hope so, since it would make for a terrific song. Sadly, it seems that Everly never got around to writing and recording it. But what he accomplished in life was, of course, already way more than enough. Some of the greatest rock music of the ’60s would not have sounded the way it did if it weren’t for Phil and Don. That’s a hell of a legacy to leave behind.

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The KKK Leader Haunted-House Song the Late Phil Everly Never Got To Write

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UN Mulls Plan to Defend Against Earth-Demolishing Asteroids

Mother Jones

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If scientists were to discover, later this week, that an asteroid large enough to destroy the Earth will smash into the planet in a years’ time, humanity would have only one course of action, says former astronaut Russell Schweickart: “Make yourself a nice cocktail and go out and watch.”

That’s why the United Nations is forming an “International Asteroid Warning Group,” on the advice of an association of former astronauts, to share data about threatening asteroids. In a set of forthcoming recommendations, the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) will loosely outline the emergency steps that the UN’s longstanding Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space must take if the asteroid warning group identifies an extinction-level space rock on a collision course with Earth. (The best option, according to ASE, would be to crash a spacecraft into the asteroid to knock it off course.)

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UN Mulls Plan to Defend Against Earth-Demolishing Asteroids

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Can You be Denied a Loan Because You’re Unpopular on Facebook?

Mother Jones

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It’s already well known that Facebook and other social media networks harvest user data and sell it to companies that use that info to peddle their products to consumers. But some lenders have begun to find a new use for this information, scrutinizing Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn data to determine the credit-worthiness of loan applicants. It’s an unprecedented practice that consumer advocates say can be unfair or discriminatory—and one that is poised to only become more prevalent in the years ahead.

Among the US-based online lenders that factor in social media to their lending decisions is San Francisco-based LendUp, which checks out the Facebook and Twitter profiles of potential borrowers to see how many friends they have and how often they interact; the company views an active social media life as an indicator of stability. The lender Neo, a Silicon Valley start-up, looks at the quality and quantity of an applicant’s LinkedIn contacts for clues to how quickly laid-off borrowers will be rehired. Moven, which is based in New York, also uses information from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites in their loan underwriting process.

Several international lenders have been using similar tactics for a while. Lenddo, for example, which makes loans to folks in developing countries, denies credit to applicants who are Facebook friends with someone who was late repaying a Lenddo loan. Big banks have not yet jumped on board with this controversial credit-vetting method, but consumer advocates and financial industry experts say it’s probably only a matter of time.

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Can You be Denied a Loan Because You’re Unpopular on Facebook?

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Politics Makes Morons of Us All

Mother Jones

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Today, Yale law professor Dan Kahan presents evidence that we Americans really suck at math. “Correctly interpreting the data was expected to be difficult,” he says of the test subjects from his latest study, and he turned out to be right. But all he was asking them to do was calculate a simple percentage. If 200 out of 300 people in one group get better by taking a pill and 100 out of 125 people in a different group get better by doing nothing, which is better? Taking a pill or doing nothing? You’d pass Kahan’s test if you understood that the raw numbers aren’t enough to get the right answer. You have to calculate the percentage of each group that got better.

It’s disheartening that most people couldn’t figure that out, though hardly unexpected. But what came next is….well, not unexpected, maybe. But certainly discouraging. Kahan ran the exact same test with the exact same data, except this time the question was about gun bans and crime levels. Half of the time, he presented data suggesting that a gun ban increased crime, while the other half of the time the data suggested that a gun ban decreased crime. And guess what? Among the subset of test subjects who were very good at math, they suddenly got really stupid if they didn’t like the answer they got. Here’s the chart:

This comes via Chris Mooney, who describes the whole thing in much more detail here. However, there’s one big caveat: If I’m interepreting the dataset correctly, the sample size of highly numerate subjects is very small. Roughly speaking, there were about 30 liberals and 30 conservatives who were highly numerate and were given the gun ban version of the test. That’s not a lot.

On the other hand, the effect size is pretty stunning. There’s a huge difference in the rate at which people did the math correctly depending on whether they liked the answer they got. I’d like to see some follow-ups with more subjects and different questions, but it sure looks as if we’d probably see the same dismal effect.

How big a deal is this? In one sense, it’s even worse than it looks. Aside from being able to tell that one number is bigger than another, this is literally about the easiest possible data analysis problem you can pose. If ideologues actively turn off their minds even for something this simple, there’s really no chance of changing their minds with anything even modestly more sophisticated. This is something that most of us pretty much knew already, but it’s a little chilling to see it so glaringly confirmed.

But in another sense, it really doesn’t matter at all. These days, even relatively simple public policy issues can only be properly analyzed using statistical techniques that are beyond the understanding of virtually all of us. So the fact that ideology destroys our personal ability to do math hardly matters. In practice, nearly all of us have to rely on the word of experts when it comes to this kind of stuff, and there’s never any shortage of experts to crunch the numbers and produce whatever results our respective tribes demand.

We believe what we want to believe, and neither facts nor evidence ever changes that much. Welcome to planet Earth.

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Politics Makes Morons of Us All

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North Carolinians could be forced to accept fracking on their property

North Carolinians could be forced to accept fracking on their property

Donald Lee Pardue

Forced fracking could be coming to Chatham County, N.C.

Not willing to sell out to frackers? If you’re a property owner living above natural gas reserves in North Carolina, you might not have a choice.

A panel charged by the state’s legislature with developing hydraulic fracturing guidelines recommended Wednesday that property owners be forced to allow drilling beneath their property if enough of their neighbors want it. From the Associated Press:

A panel commissioned by state government said Wednesday that forced fracking should be allowed in North Carolina.

Forced or compulsory pooling allows the state to let energy companies drill into natural gas reserves under non-consenting property owner’s land. Property owners in the state receive a percentage of the profits from gas extracted from under their property.

The study group recommended at least 90 percent of acreage of a drilling area be voluntarily leased before remaining property owners are forcibly pooled.

The News & Observer reports that the recommendation is expected to be adopted by the state legislature this fall. More from the article:

The proposal by a state study group endorses a rarely used 1945 law that’s never been tried here on the kind of scale that would be required for shale gas exploration, or fracking. Thousands of property owners could potentially be affected in the state’s gas-rich midsection in Lee, Moore and Chatham counties. …

“We are talking about a for-profit industry taking away personal freedoms with the blessing of the government,” Therese Vick, a community activist with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, told the Compulsory Pooling Study Group.

Taking away those personal freedoms is already the norm in some states. In Ohio, there’s an unofficial guideline stating that if 90 percent of property owners in an area consent to the sale of a gas deposit, everybody else has to sell out to frackers too, according to the Compulsory Pooling Study Group’s draft report [PDF]. In Kentucky, the figure is 51 percent. In Virginia, it’s just 25 percent.

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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North Carolinians could be forced to accept fracking on their property

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