Author Archives: OpalSkillen

Bannon Gives Team Trump a New Rallying Cry: "Deconstruct the Administrative State"

by OpalSkillen Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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Steve Bannon says that President Trump appointed all his cabinet members with a common goal: “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Meaning what?

Meaning the system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president says have stymied economic growth and infringed upon U.S. sovereignty. Bannon says that the post-World War II political and economic consensus is failing and should be replaced with a system that empowers ordinary people over coastal elites and international institutions.

At the core, Bannon said in his remarks, is a belief that “we’re a nation with an economy — not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a reason for being.”

Oh. Bannon is supposedly the brains behind the Trump operation, but this still sounds like gibberish to me. Combined with his calls for increased “sovereignty,” “economic nationalism,” and an epic twilight battle against Arabs for the soul of humanity, I assume this is just a politically correct phrase that describes his personal jihad against non-Christianity without quite saying so. In particular, Bannon’s “deconstruction” appears to encompass a war against Muslims, secular humanists, liberal Catholics, and maybe Jews. But it’s so crude to say that out loud, isn’t it?

In any case, I eagerly await huge crowds of Trump supporters waving signs that say “Deconstruct the Administrative State!!!” What will the competing signs say?

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Bannon Gives Team Trump a New Rallying Cry: "Deconstruct the Administrative State"

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Why Is Texas So Gung Ho to Execute This Delusional, Mentally Ill Man?

by OpalSkillen Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Almost no one wants to see Scott Panetti put to death. Conservatives such as Ron Paul and Ken Cuccinelli and evangelical leaders have spoken up on his behalf. The European Union has protested his pending execution, which is temporarily on hold thanks to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Even some of Panetti’s victims don’t believe he should be killed by the state.

The Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot execute a mentally ill person who lacks a rational understanding of the nature of his punishment. Panetti fits that standard: He insists that Texas wants to kill him to prevent him from preaching the Gospel. And yet the state has gone to great lengths to ensure that Panetti gets the needle. Right up until December 3, when the 5th Circuit temporarily halted Panetti’s execution with hours to spare, the state has deployed legal gamesmanship that seems more appropriate for patent litigation than a death penalty case.

Panetti’s schizophrenia has been apparent since 1978, when he was 20 years old. By 1986, the Social Security Administration had declared him disabled by his brain disorder and therefore eligible for federal benefits. Six years later, after a series of hospitalizations and bizarre incidents—in one case he buried demon-possessed furniture in his yard—Panetti shot and killed his in-laws, Joe and Amanda Alvarado.

His criminal case was a theater of the absurd from the outset, thanks to a series of puzzling legal decisions by Texas and federal judges. It began when Kerr County District Judge Stephen Ables, still on the bench today, permitted Panetti to represent himself at trial over the objections of the state. He showed up wearing what a friend of the family later described as a 1920s-era cowboy outfit: “It looked idiotic. He wore a large hat and a huge bandana. He wore weird boots with stirrups, the pants were tucked in at the calf,” she testified in an affidavit. “He looked like a clown. I had a feeling that Scott had no perception how he was coming across.” Thus clad, standing before the jury, Panetti called himself “Sarge” and rambled incoherently for hours with little interruption from the judge—who did, however, argue with the defendant over the relevance of belt buckles and whether he could discuss the TV show Quincy. As part of his defense, Panetti issued a stream-of-consciousness description of his crime, from Sarge’s perspective:

Fall. Sonja, Joe, Amanda, kitchen. Joe bayonet, not attacking. Sarge not afraid, not threatened. Sarge not angry, not mad. Sarge, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom, boom, boom. Sarge, boom, boom.

Sarge is gone. No more Sarge. Sonja and Birdie. Birdie and Sonja. Joe, Amanda lying kitchen, here, there, blood. No, leave. Scott, remember exactly what Sarge did. Shot the lock. Walked in the kitchen. Sonja, where’s Birdie? Sonja here. Joe, bayonet, door, Amanda. Boom, boom, blood, blood.

Demons. Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh, Lord, oh, you.

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Why Is Texas So Gung Ho to Execute This Delusional, Mentally Ill Man?

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The Ohlone People Were Forced Out of San Francisco. Now They Want Part of Their Land Back.

by OpalSkillen Posted on November 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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“There are only three ways to get land,” said Tony Cerda, chairman of the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe, in 2010. “You can buy it, have it given to you, or steal it.” It’s clear which one of those applies to his people, the Ohlone, who lived in the central California coastal region for thousands of years prior to the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. The Ohlone once numbered as many as 15,000 on lands stretching from the San Francisco Bay to Big Sur. But following years of enslavement under the Spanish mission system and, later, persecution by settlers, they are now largely a people in exile.

Cerda’s tribe—about 2,000 people living in the Pomona area east of Los Angeles—are now the largest contemporary Ohlone group in the state. They’re leading the push for cultural recognition in the city of San Francisco. Specifically, they’re asking the city for land to build a cultural center as part of a proposed shoreline redevelopment project in the Hunters Point Shipyard area. The area was once the location of a historic Ohlone village and burial site—one of over 425 in the San Francisco Bay region.

Ohlone leaders say a cultural center would highlight the oft-overlooked history of California’s native people while serving as a permanent place for today’s tribes to continue their song, dance, language, and art traditions. And they’re also hoping to rebuild their cultural presence through community events like the annual Big Time Gathering, which took place in October in San Francisco’s Presidio National Park. This year’s gathering was the biggest yet, drawing more than 100 Native Californians from seven different tribes. Their goal is to honor their roots, says Neil Maclean, one of the event’s organizers: “Through hearing them sing, seeing them dance, and joining with them in ceremony, the Ohlone will tell their side about what it is like to survive.”

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The Ohlone People Were Forced Out of San Francisco. Now They Want Part of Their Land Back.

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Get ready for more “extreme” El Niños

by OpalSkillen Posted on January 21, 2014

Get ready for more “extreme” El Niños

By

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Batten down the worldwide hatches. Scientists say baby Jesus’ meteorological namesake will become a thundering hulk more often as the climate changes.

The latest scientific projections for how global warming will influence El Niño events suggest that wild weather is ahead. El Niño starts with the arrival of warm water in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and it can culminate with destructive weather around the world. It was named by Peruvian fishermen after the infant Jesus because the warm waters reached them around Christmas.

We’ve previously told you that El Niños appear to be occurring more frequently as the climate has been changing. The authors of the latest paper on this subject, published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change, don’t project that El Niños will become more common in future. What they do project, though, is that twice as many El Niños will be of the “extreme” variety.

Extreme El Niños happened in the early 1980s and again in the late 1990s when surface water temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean shot up, triggering global weather pandemonium. Here’s a reminder of what that was like, taken from the new paper:

Catastrophic floods occurred in the eastern equatorial region of Ecuador and northern Peru, and neighbouring regions to the south and north experienced severe droughts. The anomalous conditions caused widespread environmental disruptions, including the disappearance of marine life and decimation of the native bird population in the Galapagos Islands, and severe bleaching of corals in the Pacific and beyond. The impacts extended to every continent, and the 1997/98 event alone caused US$35–45 billion in damage and claimed an estimated 23,000 human lives worldwide.

Jeez, that was a pretty horrible reminder. What’s worse than being reminded of past such disasters, though, is imagining more of them in the future — and that’s just what authors of this paper say we should be doing.

After aggregating the findings of different climate simulations, the scientists found that “the total number of El Niño events decreases slightly but the total number of extreme El Niño events increases.”

The slight decrease in the frequency of El Niños detected by the models wasn’t statistically significant, meaning there’s considerable uncertainty over whether such a decrease would actually occur. But the increase in extreme such events was statistically significant. That means that if the researchers’ models produced accurate simulations, we could start to expect extreme El Niños once every decade by the end of the century.

“Potential future changes in such extreme El Niño occurrences could have profound socio-economic consequences,” the scientists warn in their paper.


Source
Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming, Nature Climate Change

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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Get ready for more “extreme” El Niños

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How Not to Report on Test Scores and Free Lunches

by OpalSkillen Posted on December 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby is complaining today about numerical illiteracy among our nation’s elite reporting class. Item 1: the New York Times describes a 10-point improvement among fourth graders on the NAEP test as “small.” In fact, it’s roughly a full grade level. If you think that improving by a full grade level in a single decade is small, you’re either crazy or innumerate.

Item 2: M. Night Shyamalan talks about the fact that American test scores are pretty high in “districts in which the poverty rate was less than 10 percent.” However, the only income data we have for most test takers is related to the National School Lunch Program. Shyamalan is using eligibility for free or reduced meals as a marker of poverty. But it’s not. And since here at MoJo we’re dedicated to lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness, here are the exact eligibility requirements for free and reduced-price lunches in 2013, courtesy of the Agriculture Department:

Obviously, folks eligible for reduced-price meals aren’t exactly swimming in cash. Still, a family of three making $36,000 isn’t anyone’s idea of poverty, and it’s misleading to say so. Eligibility for free meals would be a fairly decent proxy for poverty—they account for about a third of all NSLP meals—but unfortunately that data isn’t collected separately. You either qualify for NSLP or you don’t, and something like two-thirds of all schoolchildren qualify. It’s a pretty broad brush, and there are damn few school districts in which fewer than 10 percent of kids qualify.

FWIW, this is why I’ve never bothered breaking down test scores by income. The only data available is eligibility for NSLP, and between the loose requirements and the virtual nonexistence of verification1, it simply doesn’t mean very much. It can give you a very broad feel for how rich or poor a particular school or district is, but that’s it.

1Which I’m all in favor of, by the way. This is a program that probably doesn’t benefit from tighter scrutiny. Nonetheless, it makes it nearly useless as a proxy for poverty among test takers.

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How Not to Report on Test Scores and Free Lunches

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