Author Archives: WilmaAldrich

A big earthquake hit Oklahoma’s oil hub, and the oil industry likely has itself to blame.

by WilmaAldrich Posted on November 7, 2016

Responding to the mass arrests of protesters last week, Greenpeace called on President Obama to “revoke all permits and halt construction of the pipeline,” send Justice Department observers to protect the civil rights of protesters, and order North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple to remove the National Guard from protest encampments along the pipeline’s planned route.

The Sierra Club, the nation’s largest green group, made the same demands in slightly more cautious terms.

The issue is now resonating beyond the environmental movement. CREDO Action, a progressive advocacy network, has gathered 386,000 signatures for a petition telling Obama to stop the project and 184,000 signatures on their petition asking Obama to prevent Gov. Dalrymple’s suppression of Native American pipeline opponents.

The push to stop the pipeline is likely to intensify after the election. On Nov. 15, CREDO will join with anti-fossil fuel and environmental justice organizations such as 350.org and the Indigenous Environmental Network for a day of action at Army Corps of Engineers offices around the country.

Protesters from Standing Rock have recently begun taking their demands directly to Hillary Clinton, who has avoided taking a position for or against the pipeline.

Read Grist’s previous coverage of the fight over the proposed pipeline.

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A big earthquake hit Oklahoma’s oil hub, and the oil industry likely has itself to blame.

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Everything You Need to Know About Yik Yak, the Social App at the Center of Missouri’s Racist Threats

by WilmaAldrich Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, University of Missouri police arrested 19-year-old Hunter M. Park for “making a terrorist threat” on the anonymous messaging app Yik Yak. And later that morning, in a separate incident, police nabbed Connor Stottlemyre, a freshman at Northwest Missouri State University, in connection to a message he allegedly posted on the site: “I’m gonna shoot any black people tomorrow, so be ready.”

Just two days earlier, amid protests over racial inequality at the University of Missouri, “Yakkers” on and around campus took to the app’s hyperlocal message boards to debate the resignations of university president Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin and question whether the protests did more harm than good. As the threats of harming black students allegedly linked to Park and Stottlemyre surfaced, concern spread throughout the University of Missouri, Columbia campus. Once bustling spaces were left empty as many students stayed home.

So what exactly is Yik Yak, the app at the center of these cases? Here’s what you need to know:

What is Yik Yak? Yik Yak is a bulletin board-style, location-based social network where users can anonymously post messages to anyone within a five-mile radius. The app, founded in 2013 by two recent college graduates, was meant to be “a place where communities share news, crack jokes, ask questions, offer support, and build camaraderie,” cofounder Brooks Buffington explained in a blog post on Wednesday. The site is limited to users who are 17 or older and has become especially popular on college campuses. The company has built “geofences” to block the app’s use around elementary, middle, and high schools.

In theory, the app operates as a self-policing community. As on sites like Reddit, Yakkers can upvote comments they like and vote down comments they don’t making it harder for them to be seen. Yet the seemingly innocuous banter can devolve into a cesspool of crude and demeaning remarks, blurring the line between free speech and online bullying.

If message contains threatening (but not necessarily racist or abusive) language, the app is supposed to detect it. A pop-up will warn about the consequences of posting that message. “You’re probably an awesome person but just know that Yik Yak and law enforcement take threats seriously,” reads one warning screen. Critics say that these pop-ups are not enough to curb abuse on the social network.

Yik Yak

Is it really anonymous? It’s unclear how exactly university police linked Park to the anonymous posts, but a Yik Yak spokesperson confirmed to Mother Jones that authorities need a subpoena to obtain user information unless “a post poses a risk of imminent harm.” That’s what happened three weeks ago, when Texas A&M police obtained an emergency subpoena to arrest and charge Christopher Louis Bolanos-Garza for posting a threat on Yik Yak.

“Yik Yak cooperates with law enforcement and works alongside local authorities to help with investigations,” a Yik Yak spokesman said in a statement. After submitting a detailed request to Yik Yak, authorities can obtain information such as a “user’s IP address, GPS coordinates, message timestamps, telephone number, user-agent string, and/or the contents of other messages from the user’s posting history,” according to the site’s legal provisions. Yik Yak handles these on a “case-by-case basis.”

The company’s statement also says that it “may provide information without a subpoena, warrant, or court order when a post poses a risk of imminent harm.”

What constitutes an imminent threat on Yik Yak? The company may disclose user information to authorities “when we believe that doing so is necessary to prevent death or serious physical harm to someone,” according to its legal fine print. These provisions highlight examples of imminent dangers that include bomb threats, kidnapping, school shootings, or suicide threats. Yakkers can also flag and report posts and file complaints with the company.

In Park’s case, university police received numerous complaints from people about his alleged threat, though it’s unclear if it had been flagged by Yik Yak.

What kinds of problems have cropped up on Yik Yak elsewhere? At colleges and universities throughout the country, threats of mass shootings, racially charged commentary, sexually explicit comments, and even a sex tape have cropped up on the network. The Washington Post has a list of incidents here. The Post reports that at least a dozen universities have tried to banish the app by blocking access to it on campus wi-fi. In May, after seven students filed complaints about feeling threatened on the app, the College of Idaho tried to ban Yik Yak and asked the company to build a geofence around the campus. Yik Yak declined to do so.

What’s next for Yik Yak? Pressure is mounting on the company to step up its efforts to curb harassment and threats. In October, a coalition of 72 feminist and civil rights groups urged the Department of Education to issue guidelines that protect “students from harassment and threats based on sex, race, color, or national origin” on Yik Yak and other anonymous social media platforms. The coalition told the Post they would send a letter to the app’s Silicon Valley investors, urging them to strengthen the company’s policies to combat “hateful targeting and harassment of students on college campuses.”

Buffington, Yik Yak’s cofounder, emphasized in his blog post about the events at the University of Missouri, “Let’s not waste any words here: This sort of misbehavior is NOT what Yik Yak is to be used for. Period.” Part of the Yakker herd, he wrote, means respecting one another: “At its core, Yik Yak is your community; it’s an extension of the real world directly around you.” And like the real world, Yik Yak can get pretty messy.

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Everything You Need to Know About Yik Yak, the Social App at the Center of Missouri’s Racist Threats

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There Is Poop in Basically All Hamburger Meat

by WilmaAldrich Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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There’s a “simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill,” wrote Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. “There is shit in the meat.”

A new Consumer Reports investigation suggests that things haven’t changed much since the publication of Schlosser’s 2001 blockbuster. The team tested 300 packages of ground beef, bought from more than 100 grocery, big-box, and natural food stores in 26 cities nationwide. The result:

All 458 pounds of beef we examined contained bacteria that signified fecal contamination (enterococcus and/or non-toxin-producing E. coli), which can cause blood or urinary tract infections.

But not all burger meat is created equal. The researchers also compared the bacterial load of beef from conventionally raised (181 samples) cows to that of their no-antibiotic, grass fed, and organic peers (116 samples total), grouped under the heading “more sustainably produced.” Here’s what they found:

From “How Safe is Your Beef?,” Consumer Reports

The bacterial implications of beef production practices really emerged when the researchers tested the bacterial strains for resistance to antibiotics. Nearly a fifth of conventional ground beef carried bacteria three or more classes of antibiotics—more than double the number found in the “more sustainably produced” samples, and triple that found in samples from cows raised outdoors on grass.

From “How Safe is Your Beef?,” Consumer Reports

The article offers plenty of information that could explain these differences. As for why essentially all ground beef carries fecal bacteria, the slaughter and processing of huge animals is messy—feces caked on the hide or trapped in intestines can easily move onto the carcass. That’s not such a big deal in steaks and roasts, because the bacteria tend to stay on the surface, so “when you cook them, the outside is likely to get hot enough to kill any bugs.” But with ground beef, “the bacteria get mixed throughout, contaminating all of the meat—including what’s in the middle of your hamburger.”

Then there’s this problem: “The meat and fat trimmings often come from multiple animals, so meat from a single contaminated cow can end up in many packages of ground beef.”

As for why conventional production—source of 97 percent of US burger meat, according to CR—is moderately more likely to contain certain bacteria like E. coli, and much more likely to contain multi-drug-resistant strains, the report delivers a detailed look at the different production systems.

Conventionally raised cows start out on grass but spend the final months of their lives on feedlots, where they fatten on diets of corn and soybeans, even though “cows’ digestive systems aren’t designed to easily process high-starch foods such as corn and soy,” creating an acidic environment in the cows’ digestive tract that can “lead to ulcers and infections” and “shed more E. coli in their manure.

And corn and soy aren’t the only delicacies feedlot cows feast on.

Their feed can also include include candy (such as gummy bears, lemon drops, and chocolate) to boost their sugar intake and plastic pellets to substitute for the fiber they would otherwise get from grass. Cattle feed can also contain parts of slaughtered hogs and chickens that are not used in food production, and dried manure and litter from chicken barns.

In addition, they can also receive regular low doses of antibiotics, both to prevent infections and promote faster growth, although the Food and Drug Administration has launched a voluntary program to limit the latter use. One common feedlot antibiotic, tylosin—used to ward off liver abscesses—is in “a class of antibiotics that the World Health Organization categorizes as ‘critically important’ for human medicine,” CR reports.

The magazine recommends that consumers buy from the alternative supply chains “whenever possible”—”sustainable methods run the gamut from the very basic ‘raised without antibiotics’ to the most sustainable, which is grass-fed organic.” (The article contains ample detail on each.) And when you get it home, handle it carefully and cook it to 160 degrees. After all, there’s shit in pretty much all the ground beef.

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There Is Poop in Basically All Hamburger Meat

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