Author Archives: Raisacjayv

Irma has broken a mind-boggling number of records.

by Raisacjayv Posted on September 8, 2017

One would think that the demise of ticks and tapeworms would be cause for celebration (especially if your introduction to parasites was, as in my case, an encounter with zombie snails at a mercilessly young age).

But hold the party, say researchers. After studying 457 species of parasites in the Smithsonian Museum’s collection, mapping their global distribution, and applying a range of climate models and future scenarios, scientists predict that at least 5 to 10 percent of those critters would be extinct by 2070 due to climate change–induced habitat loss.

This extinction won’t do any favors to wildlife or humans. If a mass die-off were to occur, surviving parasites would likely invade new areas unpredictably — and that could greatly damage ecosystems. One researcher says parasites facilitate up to 80 percent of the food-web links in ecosystems, thus helping to sustain life (even if they’re also sucking it away).

What could save the parasites and our ecosystems? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Reduce carbon emissions.”

If emissions go unchecked, parasites could lose 37 percent of their habitats. If we cut carbon quickly, they’d reduce by only 20 percent — meaning the terrifying (but helpful!) parasites creating zombie snails will stay where they are.

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Irma has broken a mind-boggling number of records.

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Chris Christie Needs to Talk to Bridget Anne Kelly Pronto

by Raisacjayv Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Recent political scandals have given us a whole new set of colorful euphemisms for dodgy behavior. Wide stance. Walking the Appalachian trail. Drunken stupor. And now, We’re doing a traffic study.

More MoJo coverage of Chris Christie’s bridge scandal


Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal, Explained


Chris Christie: I Am “Heartbroken” And “Embarrassed” About Bridge Scandalâ&#128;&#148;But Not Guilty


Christie Administration’s Bridge Lane Closure Slowed Search for Missing 4-Year-Old, Says Official


Here Are the Chris Christie Emails Everyone Is Talking About


9 Times Chris Christie Denied Using a Bridge for Political Revenge


VIDEO: David Corn on What Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Means for 2016


5 Unanswered Questions About Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal


Bridgegate Edges Closer and Closer to Chris Christie Himself

And speaking of Bridgegate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie held an epic press conference today about it. Actually, “held” is the wrong word. As I write this, it’s still going on. He’s apologized repeatedly, denied that he’s a bully, claimed that he’s embarrassed and humiliated, and fired a couple of his close aides. He’s doing pretty well, and if he’s telling the truth that he knew nothing about any of this before it happened, then he might be able to put it all behind him eventually. Still, I was struck by this:

Q: I’m wondering what your staff said to you about why they lied to you. Why would they do that? What was their explanation? And what about Mr. Samson? What role did he play in this?

GOV. CHRISTIE: I have — I have not had any conversation with Bridget Kelly since the email came out. And so she was not given the opportunity to explain to me why she lied because it was so obvious that she had. And I’m, quite frankly, not interested in the explanation at the moment.

Bridget Anne Kelly was one of Christie’s top aides, and very clearly someone who was rather gleefully involved in planning the pre-election lane closures on the George Washington Bridge as retribution against the mayor of Ft. Lee. But Christie wasn’t interested in talking to her directly to find out what was going on? Really? That sounds like a guy who either (a) already knows what she’d tell him, or (b) is afraid of what she might tell him.

A friend of mine also emails with this:

Here’s something I haven’t heard yet, and it seems kinda obvious to me:

Bridget Anne Kelly: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”

David Wildstein: “Got it.”

Does this exchange sound like it’s between two people who are suggesting a new and novel way to screw their political opponents, or between two people who have clearly done this before?

If I’m working in the governor’s office1 and someone sends me an email saying “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee!” I’d probably email back something like, “What are you talking about?” or “What happened in Fort Lee that’s causing all the traffic?” Instead, Wildstein knows what she’s getting at right away, and what he’s supposed to do. Then he does it.

It would surprise me less if this turns out to be the only time they’ve done this than if we discover two or three more incidents of politically inspired “traffic problems.”

Maybe that’s what Christie is afraid to find out?

1Actually, Wildstein worked at the Port Authority. But you get the idea anyway. “Wildstein was known as the Governor’s eyes and ears inside this massive agency,” says one reporter, and he’s a longtime friend and confidante of Christie’s.

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Chris Christie Needs to Talk to Bridget Anne Kelly Pronto

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Watchdog Group Banned from YouTube After Anti-Gay Chaplain Complains About YouTube Comments

by Raisacjayv Posted on November 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Thursday afternoon, Right Wing Watch, an offshoot of the progressive group People for the American Way that monitors the public statements of prominent figures on the religious right, had its YouTube account suspended at the request of an anti-gay former Navy chaplain who is running for a seat in the Colorado legislature. Gordon Klingenschmitt, who left the Navy in 2006 and has had a second career as an evangelical activist, sent out a triumphant press release heralding the news under the tag “David takes down Goliath.” YouTube told Right Wing Watch it was being suspended because it had violated Klingenschmitt’s copyright, but the chaplain’s statement suggests he had another motive for filing the complaint: Right Wing Watch had done nothing to stop threats on his life from its “followers”:

Three of those posts, still active on YouTube as of 16 Aug, call upon RWW’s followers to kill Chaplain Klingenschmitt:
1. can we murder this fu**
2. I don’t think he’s a fetus. So yeah, you could murder him and still be pro-life.
3. Another white a** cracker pu*** that needs a .45 Caliber renovation.

Three other followers of RWW stated they wished the Chaplain would die, or had been murdered by an abortionist, or praised the demon of murder.
4. What a pathetic little bi***. Can’t wail till these people die out.
5. Don’t diss the “deamon of murder”, I’ve met him. He’s not a bad guy.
6. This guy is a sh** person and would have been better if he was aborted.

In a blog post, Brian Tashman, a writer and researcher for the Right Wing Watch, confirmed the cancelation of the group’s YouTube account and said Right Wing Watch had filed an appeal.

The catch is that the threats against Klingenschmitt weren’t made by anyone affiliated with Right Wing Watch—they were made by YouTube commenters. Given the often viral nature of Right Wing Watch‘s videos, and the often volatile nature of YouTube’s commenters, crazy comments seemed almost inevitable. I asked Klingenschmitt if this meant that he was responsible for the YouTube comments on his own site. “When I become aware of something or it’s brought to my attention, I will delete things that are inflammatory,” he said. “I’m not responsible for the initial posting but if I am alerted and don’t do anything, I am responsible.”

It’s not hard to see why Klingenschmitt, who kicked off his first political campaign in October, wouldn’t want Right Wing Watch‘s videos online. He told Colorado activist Will Perkins* that if gays are allowed to marry, “then they would be able to adopt the children of heterosexuals and therefore that increases their ability to recruit.” He described the message of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination against LGBT citizens, thusly: “The Government is now ordering you: Forsake God or starve to death.” And he suggested that demonic spirits were controlling President Obama—and Madonna.

But Klingenschmitt isn’t the first conservative to ask Right Wing Watch to take down a video, and the previous cases suggest his victory will be a short-lived. In September, YouTube denied a request from Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to take down a clip of the influential evangelical pastor suggesting that gay people wear special knife-rings that transmit AIDS to random people they meet.

*This post originally misidentified Klingenschmitt’s guest.

“The Government is now ordering you: Forsake God or starve to death,”

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/enda-near-top-ten-religious-right-claims-about-employment-non-discrimination-act-updated#sthash.yyy7hkuO.dpuf

“The Government is now ordering you: Forsake God or starve to death,”

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/enda-near-top-ten-religious-right-claims-about-employment-non-discrimination-act-updated#sthash.yyy7hkuO.dpuf

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Watchdog Group Banned from YouTube After Anti-Gay Chaplain Complains About YouTube Comments

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Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, "Burn Everything Down and Run"

by Raisacjayv Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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IF ANYONE CAN MAKE a story about a spinster who devotes her life to the study of mosses read like high adventure, it’s Elizabeth Gilbert, who published three critically acclaimed works of fiction and biography before she turned her own pizza-eating, meditating, soul-searching travel exploits into the 2006 bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. Next came Committed, a follow-up memoir that explores her ambivalence toward marriage, and At Home on the Range, a cookbook of her great-grandmother’s recipes.

In October, Gilbert will unveil The Signature of All Things, her first novel in 13 years. The book’s protagonist is Alma Whittaker, the homely, overeducated daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia plant trader who spends most of her life practicing bryology on her father’s estate before embarking, at 51, on a journey to unlock the mysteries of evolution.

For her own research, Gilbert delved into the writings of Charles Darwin, Asa Gray, and other great naturalists of the time—and, to get a sense of the common parlance, she pored over the correspondence of scientists who rattled off informal letters the way we send emails. Some of the novel’s wryest moments, though, come during flashes of modernity in which Alma expresses herself with a Liz Lemon-esque exasperation. I caught up with Gilbert, 44, to talk about her travel bug, 19th-century feminism, and the vexing tendency of creative women to sabotage their own work through the pursuit of perfection.

Mother Jones: Alma is a wonderful character. How long has she been kicking around in your head, studying botany, gathering mosses?

Elizabeth Gilbert: I did three years of research before I started writing. It was just like developing a photograph very slowly. I knew I wanted to write a woman’s story. I knew I wanted to write about 19th-century botanical exploration. I knew she was going to be an explorer of the mundane and the overlooked. I was struck by the idea of what they called “polite botanists” back then, women who for the most part were unable to travel. Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace and numberless other naturalists were able to climb mountains and explore valleys and go spelunking and do that sort of research in the jungles that leads to the taxonomical advances. But she was a woman and she was tied to her father and she couldn’t do that. I think the fundamental question I had was: What can you do as a woman with your tremendous intelligence and education when you can’t leave? Her work in the mosses is kind of like hyper-intellectualized needlepoint—the small domestic arts that women were able to do to keep themselves from going mad from boredom.

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Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, "Burn Everything Down and Run"

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NRA attacks “shadowy network” of enviros and zoos fighting to ban lead bullets

by Raisacjayv Posted on August 6, 2013

NRA attacks “shadowy network” of enviros and zoos fighting to ban lead bullets

By Claire Thompson

Shutterstock

In search of the truth.

You might think the NRA would be busy enough fighting its current battles, fending off crazy ideas like expanded background checks for gun sales. But no. The group is now picking a whole new fight, this one against activists who want to ban lead bullets.

Studies have shown that as many as 20 million birds, including endangered California condors, die each year from lead poisoning after ingesting bullet fragments. Ammunition is likely the greatest unregulated source of lead released into the environment, according to a statement [PDF] from scientific experts in lead and environmental health. Some states, notably California, are now weighing regulations to outlaw the use of lead in bullets.

The NRA isn’t going to stand by and let that happen. The group has launched a campaign called Hunt for Truth to fight back against “the assault on traditional lead ammunition” by targeting the groups and individuals — mostly scientists, nonprofits, and government agencies — behind this unconscionable attack on American values.

But the thing is, requiring hunters to use lead-free bullets wouldn’t cause them any great hardship, the Huffington Post reports:

Lead-free bullets are widely available from top manufacturers, and have not been shown to function any differently than bullets containing the highly toxic element.

So this should be a no-brainer — an easy opportunity for the NRA to toss the bird-huggers a bone and get back to its more important mission of keeping guns less regulated than toys. But since when does the NRA cave that easily?

In order to rally its members to oppose the lead regulation, the NRA described a conspiracy theory involving crooked scientists, phony research, and a shadowy network of nonprofits, zoos and government agencies all conspiring to ban hunting.

According to the NRA, an “activist portion of the scientific community” has formed “a highly organized network of like minded researchers with an agenda to ban lead ammunition.” In order to thwart this looming threat, “Hunt for Truth will expose the researchers associated with ‘faulty science’ critical of lead ammunition,” the gun lobby says.

Scientists aren’t the NRA’s only new targets. Nonprofits like the San Diego Zoo and the California Condor Recovery Team are also on the enemies list. The NRA claims these groups “have considerable influence over many legislators and regulators,” which they use to “capture” the regulatory agencies and bureaucrats responsible for lead ammunition restrictions.

Now that’s rich: the NRA — perhaps the nation’s most powerful lobby, commanding mind-boggling subservience from Congress and other lawmakers — accusing nonprofit environmental groups of controlling the legislative process. The San Diego Zoo and the California Condor Recovery Team can only dream of having even the tiniest fraction of the “considerable influence” the NRA wields. But hey, these are people who think we’d all be safer with more guns, not fewer. I can only imagine the kind of paranoia that must go hand-in-hand with that mentality.

Although I am intrigued by the idea of an underground network of shady zoos; sounds spooky. Someone call M. Night Shyamalan. Or Scooby Doo.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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NRA attacks “shadowy network” of enviros and zoos fighting to ban lead bullets

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Global Warming Could Cause 50 Percent Increase in Violent Conflict

by Raisacjayv Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

This week the exiled head of the Syrian opposition movement said he would meet representatives of President Bashar al-Assad in Geneva, a promising turn for a conflict that has left 100,000 dead, including many civilians, since spring 2011. It has been a long, bitter battle, but for many Syrians one root of the violence stretches back to several years before al-Assad’s troops began picking off anti-government protestors. Beginning in 2006, a prolonged, severe drought decimated farmland, spiked food prices, and forced millions of Syrians into poverty—helping to spark the unrest that eventually exploded into civil war.

The Syrian conflict is just one recent example of the connection between climate and conflict, a field that is increasingly piquing the interest of criminologists, economists, historians, and political scientists. Studies have begun to crop up in leading journals examining this connection in everything from the collapse of the Mayan civilization to modern police training in the Netherlands. A survey published today in Science takes a first-ever 30,000-foot view of this research, looking for trends that tie these examples together through fresh analysis of raw data from 60 quantitative studies. It offers evidence that unusually high temperatures could lead to tens of thousands more cases of “interpersonal” violence—murder, rape, assault, etc.—and more than a 50 percent increase in “intergroup” violence, i.e. war, in some places.

“This is what keeps me awake at night,” lead author Solomon Hsiang, an environmental policy post-doc at Princeton, said. “The linkage between human conflict and climate changes was really pervasive.”

Any cop could tell you that hot days can make people snap—last summer veteran police boss William Bratton argued that a warm winter contributed to a rash of murders in Chicago. But Hsiang and his colleagues wanted to see how this pattern held up across the globe, at different times and with different kinds of conflict, to gauge just how much the climate can lead to violence.

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Global Warming Could Cause 50 Percent Increase in Violent Conflict

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