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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

Mother Jones

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For some reason, the New York Times Magazine decided to poll its readers to see if they’d be willing to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby. Only 42 percent said yes.

WTF? I assume there are no time travel paradoxes involved here, nor any baroque inventions about how the world actually ends up worse without World War II. Science fiction nerds like me (and lots of you, I assume) love to natter on about stuff like this, but it really doesn’t seem like the NYTM’s thing. Basically, you get transported back to Hitler’s crib in 1889, you shoot him, and a few seconds later you return home. End of story. Would you do it?

I’m not an especially bloodthirsty guy, but hell yes, I’d do it. Sure, maybe World War II would happen anyway, though that’s hardly inevitable. Maybe the Holocaust too. But even a reasonable chance of stopping either one of them would be well worth the life of a baby who would otherwise grow up to be a monster. What am I missing here? I wouldn’t even hesitate.

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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

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A Short Primer on American Preferences in Foreign Policy

Mother Jones

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The American public largely seems to approve of President Obama’s specific foreign policy choices. They want to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan; they don’t want to go to war in Syria; they don’t want troops on the ground in Ukraine; and they support serious negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program.

And yet, paradoxically, they don’t think much of Obama’s foreign policy in the aggregate. Overall approval ratings for his foreign policy are stuck at roughly George W. Bush levels. What’s going on?

With the benefit of my vast experience reading the mood of the American public, I’d like to explain what’s going on. This should save our nation’s pundits millions of windy words trying to invent sophisticated explanations that make them look smart. Here it is:

The American public really likes short, decisive wars that the United States wins conclusively. A couple of weeks is good. A month or two is pretty much the outside limit.

That’s it! Now you understand foreign policy. Grenada: good! Panama: good! Gulf War: not bad! Kosovo: pushing it. Iraq: Horrible. Syria and other places where we fail to intervene at all: massive cognitive dissonance. War is bad! But we want to kick the bad guys in the butt! Does not compute! President is failing….failing….failing….

This has been a public service announcement. Are there any questions?

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A Short Primer on American Preferences in Foreign Policy

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Obama’s new gaseous release: A strategy to cut back on methane

Pass on Gas

Obama’s new gaseous release: A strategy to cut back on methane

White House

The White House released its strategy to cut methane emissions this morning — President Obama’s latest sashay around Congress to pursue climate action (as part of the plan he announced in June).

Methane isn’t the most ubiquitous of greenhouse gases (that’d be good ‘ol CO2), but it is a potent one: The same amount of methane as CO2 has 20 times the impact in terms of future global warming over a 100-year period. While methane emissions have decreased by 11 percent since 1990, we’re still not in good shape: 50 percent more methane is leaking from oil and gas sites than previously thought and, without action, methane emissions are expected to increase through 2030 – mostly thanks to fracking. So far the oil and gas industry has balked at the idea of regulating its methane leaks, saying that it might slow production down (we’ve all heard it before, but, man, frack you!).

Obama’s plan looks at culling methane emissions from four big sources: landfills (methane gets released when all of our biodegradable trash breaks down), leaks from oil and natural gas production, coal mining, and cow farts. The report details how the White House will delegate government agencies to come up with and enforce better standards, i.e. the EPA will manage landfills while the Department of the Interior will handle methane leaks on public lands. It also focuses on ways to capture methane to reuse it for clean energy, such as biogas systems, which can convert cattle waste into fuel. So while we’re not going to replace our cows with less-farty kangaroos, it at least offers options for putting all those bovine leavings to good use.

All of these steps are pretty minor in the face of battling climate change, but the plan overall does have people excited. “Curbing methane is … a big step in the right direction,” David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at NRDC, said in a recent press release. And from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: “As climate change continues to harm American communities from the Heartland to the coasts, we must use every tool at our disposal to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing it … I applaud the President for his ongoing commitment to public health and the environment.”

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Obama’s new gaseous release: A strategy to cut back on methane

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How to Crack the Film World’s Glass Ceiling

Mother Jones

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Judith Helfand, Julie Parker Benello, and Wendy Ettinger have spent a combined 55 years in the documentary business, enough to know how hard it can be, particularly for women, to get a film made—and seen. Plenty of women have great ideas, “but they don’t have the resources to be able to get to the next step,” Helfand says.

To fix that, the three colleagues launched Chicken & Egg Pictures, which since 2005 has raised and distributed more than $2.8 million “incubating and hatching” more than 140 woman-led film projects. Filmmakers rely on them for seed money or funding to push a nearly completed project over the finish line. “They were pretty much the first filmmaking funder that got behind the project,” recalls codirector Martha Shane, whose new film, After Tiller (read our review), follows America’s last remaining providers of third-trimester abortions.

It’s more than just money. Chicken & Egg mentors directors in the editing suite and helps them market the finished product. “Financial support was great, but the creative and emotional support was almost even better,” Shane says.

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How to Crack the Film World’s Glass Ceiling

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China’s Coal Reliance Reduces Life Expectancy by 5.5 Years, Study Says

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the Guardian website.

Air pollution causes people in northern China to live an average of five and a half years shorter than their southern counterparts, according to a study released on Monday that claims to show in unprecedented detail the link between air pollution and life expectancy.

High levels of air pollution in northern China—much of it caused by an overreliance on burning coal for heat—will cause 500 million people to lose an aggregate 2.5 billion years from their lives, the authors predict in the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The geographic disparity can be traced back to China’s Huai River policy, which, since it was implemented between 1950 and 1980, has granted free wintertime heating to people living north of the Huai River, a widely acknowledged dividing line between northern and southern China. Much of that heating comes from the combustion of coal, significantly impacting the region’s air quality.

“Using data covering an unusually long timespan—from 1981 through 2000—the researchers found that air pollution…was about 55% higher north of the river than south of it,” the MIT Energy Initiative said in a statement.

“Linking the Chinese pollution data to mortality statistics from 1991 to 2000, the researchers found a sharp difference in mortality rates on either side of the border formed by the Huai River. They also found the variation to be attributable to cardiorespiratory illness, and not to other causes of death.”

The researchers, based in Israel, Beijing, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gauged the region’s air quality according to the established metric of total suspended particulates (TSP), representing the concentration of certain airborne particles per cubic meter of air.

The study concluded that long-term exposure to air containing 100 micrograms of TSP per cubic meter “is associated with a reduction in life expectancy at birth of about 3.0 years.”

Air pollution has been the subject of widespread public outrage in China since January, when Beijing’s air quality index (AQI)—a similar metric to TSP—regularly exceeded 500, the scale’s maximum reading, for weeks on end. On January 12, Beijing’s AQI hit a record 755, 30 times higher than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organization.

Past studies have established a link between air pollution and reduced life expectancy. One recent large-scale study concluded that air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010.

Yet according to Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at MIT and one of the study’s authors, this study is the first to precisely quantify their relationship. “Demonstrating that people die a bit earlier because of pollution is interesting and helps establish that pollution is bad,” he said. “But the most important question, the next question that needed to be answered, is what’s the loss of life expectancy? How much should society be willing to pay to avoid high levels of pollution? This study was structured so we could answer that question.”

China’s central authorities are keenly aware that environmental degradation has become one of the country’s leading causes of social unrest. Last month, China’s cabinet revealed 10 new measures intended to combat air pollution, and state media reported that Chinese courts can now impose the death penalty on serious polluters.

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China’s Coal Reliance Reduces Life Expectancy by 5.5 Years, Study Says

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