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Two decades ago, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, who now fronts a quintet called The Julie Ruin, was at the forefront of the punk-rock feminist movement. I asked the riot grrrl icon what she’s listening to nowadays, and here’s what she had to say. To read the rest of our interview, click here.
1. I’d say Santigold is probably my favorite younger artist. “Creator” is the song that I listen to when I’m really like, “I can’t do it anymore!” It’s such a bold statement about being someone who makes stuff, whatever that stuff is. It gives me so much confidence.
2. I really like Grimes a lot. I love that she produces her music and she’s unapologetic about being a feminist. It sounds like a contradiction to mix fashion with feminism and I really love that she just walks through that like, “What do you mean? There’s no contradiction.”
3. I’ve been really into Vic Chesnutt lately. His music is so moving and so beautiful, and his voice is just so different than anybody else’s. I’ve lost a lot of people to suicide and I can’t listen to the music of friends who died of suicide, but I can listen to his, because he wasn’t my friend. There is sadness in his pain and also just joy. I love the idea that he survives through his music. That’s a really hopeful, sweet thing.
4. I really love LCD Soundsystem—like everybody else on the planet—just the way that James Murphy took so many references of Joy Division, or whatever he was referencing, and really was able to make it his own. He has a great record collection and knows a lot of music and it really comes out in such an interesting, beautiful way. He mixed a song on our record, so I got to meet him, and it was really fun.
5. I love old country music: Hank Williams Senior, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, and all that kind of stuff. George Jones is a favorite. I just really love the style of writing where every chorus is colored by the verse and the verses change what the chorus means. It tells stories of peoples’ lives. I listened to country music as a kid. I’m kind of leaning toward that way of writing as I get older.
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What’s Kathleen Hanna Listening to 16 Years Post-Bikini Kill?
Mother Jones
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One day after Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that the current round of nuclear negotiations “showed the enmity of America against Iran, Iranians, Islam and Muslims,” relations seem to have improved dramatically:
Iran said Friday that talks in Geneva with the group of six world powers had resolved all outstanding issues on how to carry out an agreement reached in November that would temporarily halt some of Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.
A report on Iranian state television quoted Abbas Araghchi, the deputy foreign minister….saying that “we found solutions for all the points of disagreements, but the implementation of the Geneva agreement depends on the final ratification of the capitals.” He did not specify a target date, although officials have said privately it is Jan. 20.
OK then. It sounds like progress, fitfully and slowly, is being made.
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What do you want for Christmas this year?
What I want is a nice Windows tablet. I already have an iPad and an Android tab, and a Windows device would round out my collection nicely. And although Windows haters are gonna hate, I’d personally find it pretty handy to have a tablet that can do tablet stuff but can also do real computer stuff when I need it to. In fact, even for tablet-type stuff, it would be really nice to have a full-featured web browser instead of the junky cut-down stuff that’s designed for mobile phones and then hastily modified for tablet use.
But the tablet manufacturers of the world have disappointed me. After years of promising that their next generation of processors would really and for suresies be great for tablets, Intel has finally delivered. I’ve played with several tablets using Intel’s new Atom 3770 SOC, and they’re great. Performance is snappy, web pages load as fast as they do on my desktop, and if the specs are to be believed, its power consumption is miserly enough to produce 9-10 hours of battery life. And by all accounts, Windows 8.1 is finally pretty usable too.
So the technology is finally in good shape. But where are all the tablets? Microsoft screwed up its Surface 2 Pro by opting for Intel’s top-of-the-line Haswell processors, which are overkill for anyone but a serious gamer or Photoshop fanatic and make the S2P thick, heavy, and short-lived. The ordinary Surface, which uses an ARM processor, is Windows RT only, which is a joke. By my estimate, the Surface 2 line is just about the most ill-conceived collection of product design decisions since New Coke.
No real surprise there, I suppose. But what about the rest of the tablet world? It turns out there are surprisingly few 3770-based devices. Asus has one, but it’s cheap and has crappy resolution. HP’s Omni 10 looks fairly decent, but it has limited memory and an uncertain future. The Dell Venue 11 had me drooling a bit when I first read about it (11-inch screen! Full-size USB port!), but they cheaped out just a little too much on the screen, which has only OK resolution. (I’m a bug on pixel density. As far as I’m concerned, the first real tablet in the world was the iPad 3, with its Retina display. I won’t use anything with much less resolution than that.) Sharp has a super high-res Mebius device for sale in Japan, but it’s not likely to be available in the US anytime soon, if ever.
And that’s pretty much it. Here in America, there are a grand total of four devices to choose from. I want more! Santa’s elves have badly let me down this year.
POSTSCRIPT: Sophisticated readers will understand that the real point of this post is to prompt hundreds of comments telling me why I’m an idiot for wanting a Windows tablet, since there can be no possible legitimate reason for wanting one. So have at it! This is my Christmas gift to you.
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Mother Jones
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Attorney General Eric Holder is proposing a groundbreaking reform package to fix America’s increasingly overcrowded prisons, which includes doing away with mandatory minimums for certain nonviolent drug offenders, the Washington Post reports. The Justice Department also plans to reduce sentences for certain elderly prisoners, champion drug treatment programs as an alternative to prison, and bar prosecutors from listing quantities of drugs when charging minor drug offenders.
“This is a win for people concerned about overfederalization as well as overcriminalization—we just can’t keep making a federal case and a 10-year federal prison stay out of all these nonviolent drug offenders,” says Monica Pratt Raffanel, a spokesperson for Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). “States can handle drug offenders like these and, in many instances, give them better access to the treatment and supervision they need to turn their lives around.”
The way the law stands now, drug offenders caught with a certain amount of illegal drugs automatically face years in prison. A person arrested with one gram of LSD, for example, will face a 5-year mandatory minimum without parole, the same sentence doled out to Americans caught with 100 marijuana plants (see full chart below). Civil liberties advocates argue that these minimums are Draconian, expensive, and don’t give judges discretion to make sure the punishment fits the crime.
Families Against Mandatory Minimums
As the Post notes, under Holder’s new policy, mandatory minimums as they apply to specific quantities of drugs will no longer be used against offenders whose cases do not involve violence, a weapon, and selling to a minor, and they will also not be used against offenders that do not have a “significant criminal history” and ties to a “large-scale” criminal organization. A bill introduced by Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in March would codify Holder’s recommendations, giving judges the ability to hand out sentences lower than the current mandatory ones. As Molly Gill, government affairs counsel for FAMM explains, “DOJ policies change with administrations–what is really needed is a full-scale reassessment of this system by Congress, to fix this problem for good.”
Based on how Republicans have reacted to sentencing reform efforts in the past; it shouldn’t take long for conservative lawmakers to start spreading the word that the sky is falling. But as we reported last week, sentence reductions have already been retroactively applied to crack cocaine offenders—and the US Sentencing Commission has found the program to be a success. At least 7,300 prisoners sentenced under mandatory minimums have had their sentences reduced by an average of 29 months, saving taxpayers an estimated $530 million. Given that the Associated Press found that US federal prisons are 40 percent over capacity, advocates say reform can’t come soon enough.
To see how states have already been implementing sentencing reforms for crack cocaine offenders, check out the map below (unshaded parts mean that no data is available):
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On Monday, this tractor plowed over the unauthorized farm.
A guerrilla veggie-growing occupation of university-owned land in Albany, Calif., was busted by cops early Monday and thousands of zucchini, kale, squash, and other newly planted seedlings were plowed over. But the occupiers proved more resilient than a sprawling mint plant, returning Monday to replant the desecrated farm.
More than 100 activists had gathered at Gill Tract, near Berkeley, on Friday and over the weekend, with some staying on site until the Monday morning raid. They pulled weeds, tilled soil, and planted seedlings. Some pitched tents.
The 12-acre site was part of a large tract of land donated to the University of California in the 1920s and was long used for organic farming and research. But much of it is now abandoned land, slated for homebuilding and a new grocery store. Some of the land continues to be used for agricultural research, but much of that research relates to genetic engineering.
Long-simmering tensions between the university and neighborhood and student activists over how the land is used boiled over on Earth Day last year, when Occupy the Farm broke padlocks and began cultivating gardens. After several weeks, the police moved in, trashed the garden, and arrested nine people.
The U.C.-Berkeley police didn’t wait that long to raze the farm this time around. In addition to bulldozing the plantings early Monday morning, the cops arrested four activists and charged them with trespassing and interfering with police.
From Occupy the Farm’s website:
“The UC’s use of police intervention was completely unnecessary and unreasonable,” says Occupy the Farm member, Matthew McHale, “especially after we publicly declared we were leaving later today.”
“This is a pathetic waste of public resources, to arrest people who are engaged in a constructive project to demonstrate how public land can be used for the public good,” added Dan Siegel, the lawyer for the group.
Over the course of the weekend, hundreds of students, farmers, families, and interested community members participated in the revitalization of a neglected part of the historic farmland bordering San Pablo Avenue and Monroe Street. Rows of squash, kale, tomato, corn, lettuce, and even flowers replaced 5-foot high weeds, as farmers created a vibrant community space on the site of a proposed parking lot and chain grocery store.
Since Occupy the Farm first planted on the Gill tract in April 2012, the group has organized at least 10 public forums focused on the Gill Tract as an asset to community-driven participatory research. The UC Berkeley administration has consistently failed to attend, despite being invited. As one of the last large plots of fertile agricultural soil left in the East Bay, the Gill Tract holds great potential as an educational resource for community members and for UC urban agricultural research, and for providing local, sustainable, organic food.
Later Monday, about 50 people returned to replant the farm. The Oakland Tribune reported that they plan to return again this coming weekend to care for the young plants. From the article:
“We’re here to make a statement that an urban farm is a much better use of that prime soil than paving it over,” [Occupy spokesperson and U.C.-Berkeley student Lesley] Haddock said Monday.
The area in question, roughly 12 acres, is partially used by the university for agricultural research. Activists occupied part of this area for three weeks last year. Police made arrests and ended the overnight occupation of the land on May 14 last year.
But not everybody digs the illegal farming occupation. University officials and some city leaders have been quick to criticize it. And some neighbors say they are looking forward to shopping at the grocery store that’s planned for the site. It was originally going to be a Whole Foods, but the company backed out following last year’s occupation, and a Sprouts Farmers Market store is now planned. From the Oakland Tribune article:
[A] group of Albany residents opposed to the Occupy group brought a contingent of their own to the parcel along San Pablo Avenue.
“We want a grocery store here,” said Sylvia Paull, one of the anti-Occupy protesters. “We spent five years working with UC and Albany trying to get one here.”
The Occupy the Farm folks say the San Francisco East Bay’s last remnants of farming land should stay as farming land, and claim that the new grocery store would eat into the profits of existing stores in the community.
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Occupy the Farm movement rises again, hours after being raided
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When Lois Lerner, a top IRS official, revealed last Friday that agency staffers had singled out conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny over their potential political activities, she blamed low-level, “frontline” staffers in the agency’s Cincinnati office, a hub of activity that handles tens of thousands of applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS later said no high-level officials were aware of these controversial actions.
As it turns out, the current acting IRS commissioner knew that staffers were flagging applications from certain conservative groups a year before Congress and the public found out about it. And members of Congress are steaming mad that the IRS was aware of the questionable practices of some of its staffers and didn’t speak up about it. Several Republicans claim that Congress was misled by the IRS and its top brass about these actions.
The IRS said that current acting commissioner Steven Miller learned on May 3, 2012, that staffers had been picking out conservative groups for greater scrutiny than is typical. (Miller was deputy commissioner at the time.)
Yet Republican lawmakers say Miller neglected to tell Congress about the systematic singling out of conservative groups in subsequent interactions. Miller wrote two letters to Congress after his May 2012 briefing about how the IRS reviews applications for tax-exempt status, but did not mention the scrutiny of tea party groups. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House ways and means oversight subcommittee on the subject of “organizational and compliance issues related to public charities.” During questioning, Miller was asked about tea party groups being harassed, but not about tea partiers specifically. He did not mention having been briefed on the IRS’ actions.
“It is almost inconceivable to imagine that top officials at the IRS knew conservative groups were being targeted but chose to willfully mislead the Committee’s investigation into this practice,” Rep. Dave Camp, chair of the ways and means committee, said in a statement.
An IRS spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Miller wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Tuesday that the IRS’ singling out of conservative groups showed “a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made.” He added that sifting through applications for tax-exempt status was “factually complex, and it’s challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare.” He did not say why he didn’t tell Congress about the tea party scrutiny when he learned of it in May 2012.
Other lawmakers say they corresponded with the IRS on the tea party issue and can’t understand why the agency didn’t share all of what it knew. “I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said in a statement Monday. “Yet it didn’t occur to anyone at the IRS to let us know that this targeting was in fact happening? Knowing what we know now, the IRS was at best being far from forthcoming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress. These are the facts and the questions we need answered.”
They could be answered soon. On Friday, the House ways and means committee will hold a hearing on the IRS’ tea party controversy. Other House and Senate committees have pledged to investigate the matter, too.
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Be lazy, be green.
Do you drive to the grocery store? That’s not very green, nobody needs to tell you that. New research suggests you could halve the carbon footprint of your shopping just by putting your feet up and getting your groceries delivered to your door.
That’s according to calculations by University of Washington engineers. They point out in a paper published in the Transportation Research Forum journal [PDF] that delivery trucks follow efficient routes as they drop off groceries at customers’ homes.
Consider the following diagrams:
Click to embiggen.
From a university press release:
“A lot of times people think they have to inconvenience themselves to be greener, and that actually isn’t the case here,” said Anne Goodchild, UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “From an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions.”
Consumers have increasingly more grocery delivery services to choose from. AmazonFresh operates in the Seattle area, while Safeway’s service is offered in many U.S. cities. FreshDirect delivers to residences and offices in the New York City area. Last month, Google unveiled a shopping delivery service experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, and UW alumni recently launched the grocery service Geniusdelivery in Seattle. …
Emissions reductions were seen across both the densest parts and more suburban areas of Seattle. This suggests that grocery delivery in rural areas could lower carbon dioxide production quite dramatically.
“We tend to think of grocery delivery services as benefiting urban areas, but they have really significant potential to offset the environmental impacts of personal shopping in rural areas as well,” Wygonik said.
Just another excuse to give the car a rest, really.
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Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the emergency contraception drug Plan B One-Step must be made available over the counter to everyone, after the Department of Health and Human Services had decided to make it only available to women over the age of 16. But a decision that the Food and Drug Administration issued Tuesday afternoon has left some wondering if the Obama administration plans to challenge Federal District Court Judge Edward R. Korman’s April 5 decision.
Teva Women’s Health, Inc., which makes the drug, had initially applied to make Plan B One-Step available over-the-counter for all females of reproductive age, but the FDA denied that request back in December 2011. The company then submitted an amended application asking the FDA to approve Plan B One-Step for sale without a prescription for women 15 years of age and older, which is what today’s decision approved.
From the FDA’s release (emphasis theirs):
The product will now be labeled “not for sale to those under 15 years of age *proof of age required* not for sale where age cannot be verified.” Plan B One-Step will be packaged with a product code prompting a cashier to request and verify the customer’s age. A customer who cannot provide age verification will not be able to purchase the product. In addition, Teva has arranged to have a security tag placed on all product cartons to prevent theft.
While Tuesday’s decision only applies to one brand of emergency contraception and does lower the age barrier for that brand, it does not to remove the age requirement entirely. It also maintains an ID requirement to purchase the product. These restrictions, reproductive rights groups have argued, create a barrier to all women who want to buy the drug, not just women under 15, since it means that in practice the drug is only available to those with a government-issued ID. The FDA stipulated in the release that this decision is “is independent of” the lawsuit, that Teva had submitted the application before the judge’s decision, and the announcement “is not intended to address the judge’s ruling.”
But its release has reproductive rights advocates wondering if this is a precedent for how the Obama administration intends deal with emergency contraception. The judge’s decision required the FDA to make emergency contraception available over-the-counter for everyone by May 6. If the Obama administration plans to abide by the court’s ruling, some advocates wondered, why make this announcement at all?
“The FDA is under a federal court order that makes it crystal clear that emergency contraception must be made available over the counter, without restriction to women of all ages by next Monday,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the lawsuit prompting the judge’s decision. “These are daunting and sometimes insurmountable hoops women are forced to jump through in time-sensitive circumstances, and we will continue our battle in court to remove these arbitrary restrictions on emergency contraception for all women.”
A spokesman at the FDA referred Mother Jones to the Department of Justice, which is handling the lawsuit, for comment on the administration’s plans on the court decision. “The Department of Justice is considering next steps in the litigation,” said the FDA’s in its release. “In the meantime, the FDA took independent action to approve the pending application on Plan B One-Step for use without a prescription by women 15 years of age or older.”
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It’s about time. So far this year, President Obama and his advocacy nonprofit Organizing for Action have been making big pushes for gun control and immigration reform, while largely ignoring climate change. Today that’s starting to change.
Organizing for Action, the advocacy arm pushing the Obama administration’s agenda, will begin its next big policy push on Thursday with a focus on climate change.
The group, which was formed using the 2012 Obama campaign’s machinery, will begin what organizers view as a potential multi-year effort to lay the groundwork for legislative action on climate change. The first steps will come in the form of an email blast to the group’s reported 20 million subscribers Thursday morning featuring a “greatest hits” video compilation of what it calls the climate deniers in Congress.
From the email: “If we ever want to see real progress on climate change, we need to change the conversation in Washington — right now. We need every member of Congress to be part of the solution. OFA is going to hold these climate deniers accountable — even if we have to go one by one.”
Here’s the video:
More from HuffPo:
Climate change activists likely will be heartened by OFA’s decision to tackle the subject, which has remained in the backdrop since Congress failed to pass cap-and-trade legislation in 2009. But a closer look at the specific objectives of the campaign is less likely to satisfy the growing community of scientists and advocates who see an immediate need for bold action.
OFA is not advocating any specific policy prescription, nor does its campaign address the lingering question of whether the president will sign off on the construction of the [upper] part of the Keystone XL, the controversial pipeline that would carry heavy crude oil from Canada to refineries in Oklahoma. Instead, OFA’s goal is simply getting lawmakers to acknowledge the reality of anthropogenic climate change.
So: Immigration-reform legislation is actually making progress through our bitterly divided Congress. Gun-control legislation at least got a vote, and is expected to return to the Senate floor. On climate change, the Obama team isn’t backing any legislation at all — it’s just trying to shame GOP deniers, who are notoriously shameless, by getting you to sign a petition.
I guess that’s progress?
Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on
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Obama’s group Organizing for Action finally takes up climate change … sort of
