Category Archives: Badger

"Crash" vs. "Accident" Doesn’t Seem Like It Matters Very Much

by ThomasSaxton Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Emily Badger passes along news of a group trying to get us all to stop talking about traffic “accidents”:

An “accident” is, by definition, unintentional. We accidentally drop dinner plates, or send e-mails before we’re done writing them. The word also suggests something of the unforeseen — an event that couldn’t have been anticipated, for which no one can be blamed. That second connotation is what irks transportation advocates who want to change how we talk about traffic collisions. When one vehicle careens into another or rounds a corner into a pedestrian — call it a “crash,” they say, not an “accident.”

“Our children did not die in ‘accidents,'” says Amy Cohen, a co-founder of the New York-based group Families for Safe Streets. Her 12-year-old son was hit and killed by a van on the street in front of their home in 2013. “An ‘accident,'” she says, “implies that nothing could have been done to prevent their deaths.”

I remember this from my driver’s ed class 40 years ago. Our instructor told us endlessly that they were “collisions,” not accidents. But we’re still talking about accidents 40 years later, so apparently this is a tough habit to break.

And the truth is that I didn’t really get it back then. I still don’t. “Accident” doesn’t imply that something is unforeseeable, or that no one can be blamed, or that nothing could possibly have been done to prevent it. Here’s the definition:

noun. an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap.

“Unintentional” is the key word here. If you drop the dinner dishes, it’s unintentional unless you’re pissed off at your family and deliberately threw the dishes at them. Then it’s not an accident. Ditto for cars. If you deliberately run over someone, it’s not an accident. If it’s not deliberate, it is.

Nearly all “accidents” are foreseeable (lots of people drop dinner dishes); have someone to blame (probably the person who dropped the dishes); and can be prevented (stop carrying the dishes with one hand). The same is true of automobile collisions. Driving while drunk, or texting, or speeding are all things that make accidents more likely. We can work to prevent those things and we can assign blame when accidents happen—and we do.

I have a tendency to use the word “collision” because I was brainwashed 40 years ago, but it’s hard to see that it makes much difference. Here is Caroline Samponaro, deputy director at Transportation Alternatives:

“If we stopped using that word, as individuals, as a city, in a national context, what questions do we have to start asking ourselves about these crashes?” says Caroline Samponaro, deputy director at Transportation Alternatives. How did they happen? Who was to blame? An erratic driver? A faulty vehicle? A perpetually dangerous intersection?

I’m mystified. We already do all that stuff. Collisions are routinely investigated. Fault is determined. The NTSA tracks potential safety problems in vehicles. Municipal traffic departments make changes to intersections. We pass drunk driving laws. We suspend the licenses of dangerous drivers.

So it doesn’t seem to me that use of the word “accident” is either wrong or perilous. If we had a history of ignoring automobile safety because is was common to just shrug and ask “whaddaya gonna do?” you could make a case for this. But we don’t.

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"Crash" vs. "Accident" Doesn’t Seem Like It Matters Very Much

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Yeah, Scott Walker Is Boring. But It’s Not Like He’s the Only One.

by RosariaA51 Posted on July 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is officially Scott Walker day, since today he’s officially announcing his candidacy. So what can we say about him that’s new and interesting? Nothing, really, and Brian Beutler thinks that’s still his most serious problem:

Walker’s biggest liability may be this: He is incredibly dull. Not just plodding-speaker dull, though he’s often that, too, but an actually boring person. Mitt Romney is nobody’s caricature of a party animal, but he could legitimately boast of being an industrial titan, a fixer, and a man of the world. Hillary Clinton isn’t particularly charismatic, but her life story is filled with dramatic tension, and nobody who masterminded #Benghazi can be credibly dismissed as boring.

Walker, by contrast, is painfully boring. His boringness is evidenced by this sequence of 37 tweets, which go back more than four years.

Walker abbrevi8es like a tween. His life turns on snow, dairy, hot ham, Kohls, haircuts, Packers, Badgers, and watching American Idol while eating chili. His critics err when they mock him for lacking a college diploma, but they could be forgiven for observing that his intellectual incuriousness is symptomatic of lacking ambition outside politics.

Oh, snap! He abbrevi8es like a tween! But give the guy a break. His two kids are 20 and 21, and Walker probably learned to tweet from them back when they were tweens. Now he’s stuck in a time warp.

As for those 37 tweets, I guess we’ll find out soon enough if America finds Kohls and hot ham boring and unpresidential, or heartwarmingly ordinary and in touch with the common man. Or if, more likely, they don’t read his tweets at all.

Anyway, yes, Scott Walker is boring. Maybe he’ll get better with practice. Or maybe boring goes over surprisingly well with voters. Oddly enough, most world leaders aren’t really very charismatic. I’ve never quite figured out why that is. And in any case, if Walker wins he’ll be going up against Hillary Clinton, who’s never going to win any awards for charisma either.

And there’s more! In the first debate later this month, the big guns he’ll be going up against are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who are only slightly more interesting than Walker. And all of them will have Donald Trump on the stage, who’s going to make boring look really, really good by comparison. Should be a fun show.

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Yeah, Scott Walker Is Boring. But It’s Not Like He’s the Only One.

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The Rehab Racket: The Way We Treat Addiction Is a Costly, Dangerous Mess

by MerryFilson Posted on May 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Max-O-Matic

On December 30, 2012, as part of a series called Drugged, the National Geographic Channel aired an hourlong documentary about a 28-year-old named Ryan Rogers. It appeared to be a classic tale of a drunk trying against the odds to sober up, albeit with especially harrowing footage and an unusually charismatic protagonist, often shown with a radiant smile on his handsome face. In one scene, Ryan, in the midst of another day of drinking vodka straight out of the bottle, vomits into the trash can next to his armchair as his distraught grandfather looks on. In another, he roils around the passenger seat while badgering the elderly man to drive him to the liquor store.

“I apologize, you guys,” Ryan says to the camera crew in the backseat. Without a drink, “I can’t even focus or think or even understand anything.”

These scenes of craving and self-ruin unfold along the idyllic shores of Ryan’s home near Lake Tahoe, with a cheerful, late-spring alpine light dancing in the pines. During the rare moments of relative calm, Ryan’s warmth and a loving, if fraught, relationship with his family reveal someone who might have a shot at kicking addiction.

This episode of Drugged focused on the medical consequences of alcoholism, so the British production company, Pioneer Productions, followed Ryan until he entered a recovery program, which the company arranged in exchange for his willingness to lay bare his inner turmoil. Ryan’s first stop was a Texas medical clinic, where he underwent a comprehensive evaluation. After palpating his pancreas and liver, the doctor told Ryan that parts of his body were “screaming and dying” as a result of all the alcohol. The hip he broke when he fell off his bike, drunk, while pedaling to the liquor store never healed, leaving him with a rolling limp and in constant pain. At one point Ryan had permission from a psychiatrist to alleviate his withdrawal with some vodka, which he knocked back with an orange soda chaser in the men’s room. Then came the pivotal moment, a staple of addiction reality shows: the interview when the psychiatrist asked if he was willing to go into rehab.

Ryan said he was terrified, but vowed, “I want to amaze people, to let them know: I was gone, but here I am.”

The next day, Ryan arrived at Bay Recovery, a luxurious San Diego center where treatment ran about $1,800 a day. In a baggy white T-shirt, sagging jeans, and a blue bandanna, he carried his navy-blue duffel bag from a taxi to the front door of his new residence, one of several Bay Recovery houses in a neighborhood overlooking Mission Bay and SeaWorld. His room was in a tree-shaded four-bedroom house, set back from the road.

Ryan looked at the ocean and the verdant lawn. “I might not want to leave,” he said. The frame froze on his smiling face.

“Ryan took a courageous step,” the narrator intoned. “But 17 days into rehab, he died. He was only 28 years old.”

But things weren’t quite that simple. A look at the government records surrounding Ryan’s case—and the rest of the poorly regulated rehab industry—suggests that it might not have been just the drinking that killed him: It was the treatment, as well.

The documentary touched a chord with viewers. “I’m sitting here just fucking devastated,” one wrote on Reddit after the film was posted on the site. “Good God, that was absolutely crushing,” another wrote. “I was rooting so hard for him.”

Ryan’s story is a very specific tale of addiction and loss. But it’s also a case study of the fragmented, expensive, and poorly regulated rehab system. Desperate families struggle to find affordable treatment. Those who do all too often discover facilities subject to minimal standards, with regulators who do little to track what happens to patients or to assure that programs are following evidence-based best practices.

At the time of Ryan’s death, California’s medical board had opened the latest of four cases against Bay Recovery’s executive director, Dr. Jerry Rand. Among the concerns that they cited was the death of another patient several years before. And yet the center had been allowed to stay in business, leaving Rand responsible for Ryan and scores of other vulnerable addicts.

Of America’s estimated 18.7 million alcoholics, only 1.7 million—8.8 percent—are treated in specialized facilities, according to a 2012 report by Columbia’s National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. That five-year study reviewed more than 7,000 publications, analyzed five national datasets, conducted focus groups and surveys of addicts and treatment professionals, and investigated how rehab centers are licensed. Its conclusion: “Despite the prevalence of these conditions, the enormity of the consequences that result from them, and the availability of effective solutions, screening and early intervention for risky substance use is rare, and the vast majority of people in need of treatment do not receive anything that approximates evidence-based care.” Nine out of 10 people with alcohol or drug addiction, it said, get no treatment at all.

Compounding the problem is the fact that treatment is often not covered by insurance, but paid out of pocket by addicts and families. Traditionally, private insurance has covered 54 percent of Americans’ health care costs, but only 15 percent of alcohol addiction treatment. Obamacare—which requires many government-subsidized health plans to cover treatment—stands to improve matters, but quality of care remains a serious problem. While residential treatment programs must be licensed at the state level, standards vary widely. “For no other health condition are such exemptions from routine governmental oversight considered acceptable practice,” the Columbia report concluded.

A great deal of research supports modern evidence-based approaches to addiction, often involving medically supervised withdrawal, medication to help with withdrawal symptoms, support groups, and cognitive behavioral therapy. But because there are no national standards, the Columbia study notes, “patients face a patchwork of treatment programs with vastly different approaches; many offer unproven therapies and little medical supervision,” even at centers pushing “posh residential treatment at astronomical prices.”

Part of the problem is that alcohol and drug abuse have been seen less as medical conditions than moral failings requiring self-discipline, according to Scott Walters, a University of North Texas psychologist who has studied addiction treatment. The model popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous, though effective in many cases, is not based on modern science or medical research. One result are clinics staffed by “counselors” who in many states are required to have only minimal training in responding to the serious medical problems that addicts like Ryan often face.

“There’s really no quality control,” Dr. Mark Willenbring, a former director of treatment and recovery research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me. “The consumer is hard-pressed to know what’s what.”

Ryan’s mother, Genene Thomas, and his father, Tim, met when she was 16, he was 18, and they were both working at restaurants in the casinos that line the southern shore of Lake Tahoe. When she was 20, they married, and went on to have four sons.

Now 51, long divorced and remarried, Genene welcomed me into the living room of her cozy ranch house, filled with Western memorabilia and sepia-toned photos of her family wearing cowboy outfits. Genene has a tendency to smile when other people might cry. Some viewers of the documentary said she came across as cold, but she confesses that she just shuts down when confronted with overwhelming emotions. Since Ryan’s death, she’s filled stacks of notebooks with thoughts about her son.

When Ryan was growing up, the family moved a dozen times, across the country: Tahoe to New Jersey, back to California, Colorado, and even Hawaii. “Everyone would ask if we were in the military,” she said. “But Tim was just restless.”

He was also dangerously unpredictable and seriously mentally ill: Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he drank and heard voices. Some days he organized scavenger hunts for his kids; others, he’d smack them around. Once Tim hit Genene for refusing to give him the bullets he wanted to use to commit suicide. When Ryan was 10, Genene had had enough and took the children to live in a safe house. After about two years of moving around, she took the boys to Las Vegas, where her parents lived.

Ryan grew into a cheerful teen, so skilled on a skateboard that a local dealership offered to sponsor him. Like many kids in his high school, he drank and experimented with marijuana. He even dabbled with meth, but it didn’t seem out of control. When he was 19, his paternal grandparents asked if he wanted to live with them to help care for his grandmother, who’d always doted on him.

Clockwise from left: Ryan at 15 months old; 10-year-old Ryan relaxing; the Rogers family with parents Tim and Genene, Ryan, Keith, Jason, and Sean; Ryan as a boyscout winning the top award for earning the most merit patches; Ryan, Jason, and Sean camping with their father.

There, in South Lake Tahoe, Ryan met Shaleen Miller, an outspoken 28-year-old single mother with a Bettie Page vibe. Her interests ranged from the British occultist Aleister Crowley to ribald jokes, and it was love at first sight. “There was just something about Ryan,” she said. “Anyone who met him loved him. He had this light to him I’d never seen before.” Shaleen’s two daughters adored him, and they would make up stories together. Soon Shaleen and Ryan were engaged.

But when Ryan’s grandmother passed away, he began drinking more heavily. A year and a half later, in 2008, his father—who had sobered up and reengaged in the lives of his sons—died of a blood clot at age 47. Ryan helped his grandfather clear out Tim’s room in a Carson City hotel and soon spiraled further out of control. These two deaths marked a turning point in Ryan’s life. Genene grasped the scope of the problem when she found him unconscious on his filthy bed, surrounded by more than 50 empty vodka bottles of all shapes and sizes. She couldn’t wake him up.

In 2009, Ryan secured a free charity bed at a 30-day treatment program in South Lake Tahoe. He liked it, but once he returned to his familiar surroundings, he started drinking again. (The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism notes that 90 percent of alcoholics will experience at least one relapse during their first four years of sobriety.) Over the following two years, he was hospitalized several times for alcohol poisoning, including a stint lasting more than a month in intensive care.

In an attempt to jolt Ryan from his addiction, Shaleen broke off their engagement, but she remained determined to try to save him from himself. The average wait for subsidized treatment was six months, she and Genene were told, and Ryan would have to call every morning until a spot opened up. This was what he had done to get into the South Lake Tahoe program, but now he was too far gone to pick up the phone.

Desperate, Genene talked to a police officer she knew, and learned that her best shot might be to get Ryan arrested to force him into treatment. It was reasonably well-founded advice: The 2012 Columbia report found that 44 percent of addicts in publicly funded treatment programs are referred by the criminal-justice system, but only 6 percent come in via health care providers. When Genene heard that Ryan had tried heroin, she called the police. But his grandfather bailed him out, and the case stalled.

Then Shaleen stumbled upon a Craigslist ad from Pioneer Productions, a London television production company that was looking for severe alcoholics willing to be filmed in return for free treatment. Shaleen wrote an email and got a call the next day.

Pioneer declined to answer questions about the case, but Ryan’s family says the crew told them that they chose Bay Recovery because the clinic treated chronic pain as well as addiction, making it a good fit for Ryan’s twin struggles with alcoholism and his damaged hip. The clinic’s website boasted of its association with reality television producers like Lifetime and A&E and of the “unequaled” care provided by its medical director, Jerry Rand. Genene never found out who covered the cost of Ryan’s treatment.

Shaleen and one of the Pioneer crew dropped Ryan off in San Diego. “I just lost it,” she told me. For two years, she’d been emotionally preparing for him to die. Now, she allowed herself to take heart.

“Hope can be a bastard,” she said.

Even as Ryan arrived at Bay Recovery, Rand was fighting for his professional life. In 1988, when he was a general practitioner in Huntington Beach, the Orange County Superior Court had temporarily ordered him to stop practicing. The case came about after a woman whose daughter he was treating for a possible ear infection bolted out of Rand’s office and told a state medical board investigator—who happened to be sitting in the waiting room—that Rand was so impaired that his speech was slurred, his eyes were bloodshot, and he couldn’t even stand up straight. Though Rand sought treatment for his addiction to the pain pills he’d been prescribed after a back injury, the state medical board moved ahead and put his license on probation for seven years. By 1990, he had found work at a recovery center, and in 1992, he launched his own. By 2002, he was an associate director at Bay Recovery.

In 2003, Rand was barred from practicing for 60 days and put on seven years’ probation for what the medical board deemed gross negligence and incompetent treatment of a homeless patient. The board’s report does not detail what ended up happening to the patient, but in 2009—the same year Rand became Bay Recovery’s executive director—the medical board moved to revoke his license entirely. This time, the accusations included gross negligence in treating a 29-year-old woman who drowned in the bathtub at Bay Recovery. Rand had engaged in “extreme polypharmacy,” the board alleged, prescribing drugs to multiple patients with little regard for their interactions. Bay Recovery’s operations were unaffected. The California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs (DADP) investigated the drowning and ordered immediate steps to secure medications, but it did not issue any citations for 16 months.

What transpired at Bay Recovery is one example of why the rehab regulatory system is so often described as fragmented. DADP was responsible for licensing the facility, but it’s unclear whether it knew about Rand’s earlier probations. And while the medical board had charged that Rand was admitting patients who were too medically and psychologically unstable to be treated at his facility, DADP never addressed this issue while Ryan was alive.

In 2012, as a nonpartisan investigator for the California Senate, I wrote a report that exposed problems in drug and alcohol treatment facilities, including deaths that occurred when programs failed to monitor medically fragile clients or accepted addicts too sick to be in a nonmedical setting. My report found that DADP failed to pursue evidence of violations after deaths, and took as long as a year and a half to investigate the serious charges. At the time of Ryan’s death, I had been asking the agency for several months why it was allowing Bay Recovery to continue treating clients. I also interviewed Rand about Bay Recovery’s troubles for my report, but he was dismissive. The woman who died had hoarded drugs, he said, and had previously overdosed. He refused to talk about Ryan’s death. I was not able to reach him for this story.

Ryan did not have a cellphone with him, but he borrowed other residents’ phones to update Shaleen. He told her that detox—the first 72 hours without a drink—was not as bad as he had feared. He said he was “eating like a pig,” putting on weight, and could not remember when he’d felt so well. He joked that he was having a tough time sitting in a hot tub overlooking the ocean. And he was making friends with staff and fellow patients. “Everybody loved him,” Kanika Swafford, a residential technician at Bay Recovery, told me. “He never felt sorry for himself. He never blamed anyone for the choices he made.”

Clockwise from left: Ryan, 13, was a champion skateboarder; Ryan, at 14, on the top with his cousin Jared and brother Keith; Ryan goofing around with his brothers and their stepfather Glen Thomas; 15-year-old Ryan holding his baby cousin Jennifer.

On May 30, 10 days after Ryan arrived, Rand started him on buprenorphine, or “bupe,” which is often used to treat opiate addicts and may also help those who suffer from chronic pain. But it is not for everyone, and it came on top of a whole cocktail of other medications.

The day after starting on bupe, Ryan began to feel sick, according to a later report by the San Diego medical examiner, and in the following days he rapidly deteriorated. Sweaty and disoriented, he now could not hold a conversation. He urinated on the floor and tried to set things on fire. He grabbed at objects that were out of reach and tried to light a nonexistent cigarette. He told a staff member, “Thank you for the sandwiches; my ride is here.” One resident filed a complaint to Bay Recovery’s management, stating that Ryan was “hallucinating, talking to himself, stumbling about and almost falling down the stairs” and had turned a “gray-white color.” A residential technician told a counselor and one of the managers that Ryan needed medical attention.

The evening of June 5, a 20-year-old medical assistant named Giselle Jones heard banging from Ryan’s bedroom and found him on the floor of his closet, digging frantically through his things. She and a resident named Robert tried to put him back in bed, but he kept falling out, getting so agitated that he tried to crawl out a window. Jones tried to reach Rand and his brother Mitch, who was a manager of Bay Recovery, several times.

When Rand finally responded to the call, he prescribed more Ativan, an anti-anxiety medication, and Risperdal, an antipsychotic. Jones hesitated. The charts noted he’d already had two prior doses of both drugs earlier that evening. Was Rand certain she should give Ryan more? Even after he said yes, she called her manager, who told her to follow the doctor’s orders. She did, and 20 minutes later Ryan became listless. Jones tried to get him into bed, but every time she managed to move him, he collapsed. She watched as Ryan’s breathing became more labored. His pulse stopped for five minutes. Jones tried to reach Rand again, but there was no answer. Then she called her manager. Finally, at 3 a.m., she called 911. Robert, the other patient, performed CPR on Ryan. They waited for an ambulance.

At 3:40 a.m., Ryan was pronounced dead.

Later that morning, Shaleen tried to text Ryan via one of the other residents’ phones and eventually she got a response: “I’ll have the director call you back.” She left more messages, one more urgent than the next. She finally got a call back. “I could get in trouble if they knew I had contacted you,” the person said. “But we all loved Ryan so much.”

“I heard ‘loved’ and I just collapsed,” Shaleen said. She dropped the phone. Soon after, a police officer, whom authorities in San Diego had asked to contact the family, appeared at Genene’s door.

The San Diego medical examiner found that Ryan had died of acute respiratory distress syndrome, in which damage to the lungs prevents oxygen from reaching the blood. The deterioration apparently began around the time Rand started him on bupe, which—along with some of the other medications he’d prescribed Ryan—can depress breathing. While the evidence was not conclusive, “the suggestion is somehow that the treatment played a role in the development of the condition,” Dr. Jonathan Lucas, who certified the cause of death, told me.

Twenty days after Ryan’s death, officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the medical board, and the state licensing agency raided Bay Recovery and Rand’s home. They had already found that Rand had had employees illegally call in prescriptions for him under the name of another doctor. The state suspended Bay Recovery’s licenses in July 2012.

On September 6, 2012, the California medical board ordered Rand to surrender his medical license and “lose all rights and privileges as a Physician and Surgeon in California.” Police investigated Ryan’s death, and while no charges were filed against Rand, the state did find Bay Recovery “deficient” for failing to get Ryan to a hospital. Residents told state investigators that Rand excessively prescribed drugs with little regard for their interactions. One patient said he hadn’t been on any medications when he arrived, but now was taking at least 10. The state finally revoked Bay Recovery’s licenses and closed the facility in late 2012.

Pioneer Productions sent flowers and paid to have Ryan’s body cremated. It also gave Genene $1,020—money it had raised to help pay for Ryan to get his hip replaced. Pioneer wanted to arrange a memorial service, and a few weeks later family and friends gathered at Monitor Pass, an open slope south of Lake Tahoe with a dizzying view of Nevada’s basins and ranges, to scatter Ryan’s ashes. The crew filmed one last scene.

About a month after the memorial service, Pioneer told Genene that the company was sending someone from London to show her the film. A lawyer appeared a few days later and left Genene alone to watch the documentary on his laptop. She did—twice. The lawyer returned with a form for her to sign that stated she had seen the film and wanted it to run. Genene, feeling strong-armed so soon after losing her son, refused, but when the lawyer called from London a few days later to say that Pioneer had decided not to air the film on the National Geographic Channel, she was heartbroken. Genene and Ryan’s other relatives and friends saw the documentary as his legacy.

Clockwise from left: Ryan at 23 with his brother Sean, his uncle Brian Thomas, and his maternal grandparents Pat and Philette Thomas; Ryan hugs his mother Genene after his first hospitalization when he was 26; Ryan with his paternal grandfather Bob Rogers; Ryan right before he entered Bay Recovery; Ryan and the love of his life Shaleen Miller; in high school Ryan composed songs and played the guitar.

Eventually, things were resolved and Ryan’s documentary aired. Many viewers responded, expressing grief as well as concern. “I find this very strange, folks,” one posted online comment said. “The danger zone for any addict is the first 5 days at most. 17 days in he should have been feeling great and refreshed…I don’t think this documentary is telling the honest truth about what really happened to poor Ryan.”

To this day, Shaleen still gets Facebook messages from all over the world, and the shared grief has helped her cope. “That’s just an amazing thing to be able to hold on to,” she said. “Knowing his story made it out there. It gave some kind of purpose to it.”

But Genene continues to write in her notebooks the questions that plague her. Did Pioneer really want to help Ryan, or was it just about ratings? How could the state have allowed Bay Recovery to stay open after the death in the bathtub and the medical board’s case against Rand? Someone was bound to die there, she believes: “If it wasn’t Ryan, it would have been somebody else. And my son had to pay the ultimate price for trying to do the right thing.”

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The Rehab Racket: The Way We Treat Addiction Is a Costly, Dangerous Mess

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The Most Beautiful Animal You’ll Never See

by ITAVinceyt Posted on March 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010.

Last month China announced that it would ban ivory imports for a year, while it “evaluates” the effectiveness of the ban in reducing internal demand for ivory carvings on the current slaughter of approximately 100 African elephants per day. The promise, however, rings hollow following a report in November (hotly denied by China) that Chinese diplomats used President Xi Jinping’s presidential plane to smuggle thousands of pounds of poached elephant tusks out of Tanzania.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has launched its own well-meaning but distinctly inadequate initiative to curb the trade. Even if you missed the roll-out of that policy, you probably know that current trends are leading us toward a planetary animal dystopia, a most un-Disneyesque world in which the great forests and savannas of the planet will bid farewell to the species earlier generations referred to as their “royalty.” No more King of the Jungle, while Dorothy’s “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” will truly be over the rainbow. And that’s just for starters.

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The Most Beautiful Animal You’ll Never See

Posted in alo, Anchor, Badger, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Little, Brown and Company, ONA, oven, Pines, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Most Beautiful Animal You’ll Never See

Welcome to the Manosphere: A Brief Guide to the Controversial Men’s Rights Movement

by dmqugzpcv Posted on January 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mad Men: Inside the Men’s Rights Movement—and the Army of Misogynists and Trolls It Spawned

Men’s Rights Movement (mrm): A loose-knit network of groups and activists (MRAs) who believe men are an oppressed class. Most adherents consider Warren Farrell to be the intellectual father of men’s rights.

Fathers Manifesto: An early MRM website that combined calls for paternal custody rights with claims that blacks should be exiled and Catholic priests were sexually abusing children as part of a plot to spread AIDS.

A Voice for Men: Founded in 2009 by truck driver Paul Elam to “expose misandry on all levels,” the site, now a hub of the movement, is aimed at those turned off by the fringe politics of other men’s rights forums.

Register-Her.com: An offshoot of A Voice for Men, an “offender registry” purporting to track female murderers and rapists as well as women who make false rape accusations.

National Coalition for Men: A nonprofit group that “raises awareness about the ways sex discrimination affects men and boys.” Its leaders have filed lawsuits challenging registration for the draft and seeking to defund shelters for battered women.

Fathers 4 Justice: A British paternal rights group that gained notoriety in the mid-2000s after activists, some dressed as superheroes, scaled public monuments, allegedly threatened to kidnap the prime minister’s son, and defaced a portrait of the queen.

Red pill: In the classic sci-fi film The Matrix, the hero must choose between swallowing a blue pill, which will allow him to remain in a pleasant illusory world, or a red pill, which will open his eyes to the reality in which he is enslaved. In men’s rights parlance, “red pillers” realize that men, not women, are oppressed.

Pickup Artists (pua): Self-proclaimed or aspiring “alpha males” who attempt to seduce women through a system of psychological gambits called “the game.” Notable PUA figures include Roosh V (Daryush Valizadeh) of the Return of Kings website, who has published a collection of sex travel guides such as “Bang Brazil,” in which he writes, “Poor favela chicks are very easy, but quality is a serious problem.”

Anti-Slut Defense (asd): Tactics that Pickup Artists believe women use to dodge responsibility for sex, such as offering “token resistance” or claiming afterward that they were too drunk to say no.

Incel: A man who is “involuntarily celibate” and feels that women owe him sex. Mass murderer Elliot Rodger described himself as one.

puahate: A site for those who feel disillusioned by the PUA movement. Rodger, who blamed women for his sexual frustration, was a frequenter; Roosh V concluded about him: “Until you give men like Rodger a way to have sex, either by encouraging them to learn game, seek out a Thai wife, or engage in legalized prostitution… it’s inevitable for another massacre to occur.” (PUAhate shut down shortly after Rodger’s rampage.)

Gamergate: An ongoing conflict that pits “traditional” video game enthusiasts (mostly white males) against feminists and others who call for game culture to become more inclusive. Misogyny and violent threats are a hallmark of the online controversy.

4chan: An anonymous and often graphic online forum; used by Gamergaters to strategize about revenge tactics and by hackers who posted stolen nude photos of celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence.

8chan: An anonymous forum that Gamergaters started using after 4chan banned their threads.

Subreddit: A forum on the social sharing site Reddit, a.k.a. “the front page of the internet.” Gamergaters, PUA followers, and others congregate in dedicated subreddits.

Honey Badger Brigade: A group of mostly female supporters of the men’s rights movement; its weekly online radio show features such topics as “the top 13 creepiest feminist behaviors,” including “humorless vagina art.”

Mangina: What some men’s rights activists call a man who supports feminism.

Social Justice Warrior (sjw): What MRAs and Gamergaters call someone who advocates equal rights for women and minorities.

Men Going Their Own Way: A faction that vows to avoid contact and relationships with women because they think women will inevitably treat them as “disposable utilities.”

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Welcome to the Manosphere: A Brief Guide to the Controversial Men’s Rights Movement

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16 New Year’s Predictions That Are Not For 2015

by olikellopas Posted on January 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m up early (thanks, dexamethasone!) and there’s not really any news in the morning papers that I’m just bursting to respond to. So, since predictions are the thing to do when a new year dawns, here are some predictions. Not for 2015, mind you—I’m not an idiot—but for the medium-term future, which in my book extends over the next 30 years or so for reasons given in prediction #1. Here you go:

  1. AI and robotics will continue to improve rapidly. We’ll have useful AI by 2025 and full AI by 2045. This will either transform the world or destroy it. Flip a coin. However, regardless of how the end point turns out, the transition period is going to be pretty brutal for the 90 percent of the population that occupies the middle classes and below. Note that this prediction is #1 on my list for a reason. The rest are randomly placed.
  2. At some point, we will reach a tipping point and medicine will be revolutionized. I’m guessing it starts around 2025 and really takes off over the ensuing decade or two. By 2030 or so nanobots will be involved. I know this has been predicted for about as long as nuclear fusion reactors have been “twenty years away,” but honestly, that’s not a strike against this prediction. It just means that lots of influential people are habitually starry-eyed about technology, something that’s always been true for reasons of either personality or simple business self-interest. But the medical revolution will come regardless. It will just take longer than the congenital utopians thought. Speed bumps along the way aren’t reasons for cynicism, they’re the signposts of progress.
  3. Climate change is going to start to seriously bite by 2030. This will have increasingly catastrophic results in equatorial zones, which rich countries will decline to do much about despite many pious promises. We’ll be too busy adapting ourselves.
  4. However, the big wild card on climate change is geoengineering. I think there’s at least a 50 percent chance that we’ll undertake some kind of major geoengineering project by 2035, either unilaterally or as a global initiative. It will almost certainly be something of a clusterfuck, but we’ll get better with experience and the continued development of AI.
  5. On the bright side, solar panels will keep getting cheaper. By 2020 they’ll be competitive with coal in many parts of the world. As early as 2030, solar could be providing a very substantial part of our energy production if we have the brains to get serious about reducing greenhouse gases and allow government regulation to speed the process of the free market. Unfortunately, I don’t have much faith that we’ll do this. But if we do, it will allow us to start our geoengineering experiment with more modest projects, which will be a very good thing indeed. Nuclear fusion remains unlikely but not impossible.
  6. The rich world will continue to age. Old people will continue to vote in large numbers. This will reach a critical point around 2025 or so, but I don’t really know how it’s going to resolve itself. Maybe we’ll just muddle along. Maybe old people will increasingly—and successfully—demand policies that steadily kill economic growth. Maybe the young will revolt. I’m just not sure.
  7. The surveillance state will continue to grow. Partly this is because technology simply can’t be stopped, and partly because terrorism will continue to increase and we will willingly trade privacy for security. By 2030 personal privacy will be all but dead, and everyone under 40 will simply accept it. The rest of us will remain uncomfortable but won’t put up much of a fight.
  8. Social media as we know it will slowly die out. It will be replaced by (a) ubiquitous surveillance, (b) instant, ubiquitous wireless communication, and (c) immersive virtual reality. This will happen in the rich world by, say, 2030, and in the rest of the world a decade or two later.
  9. Online retail will continue to grow. Duh. Partly this will happen for the obvious reasons, partly because the experience of truly trying out a new product online before you buy will get better and better. The kindergarten version of this is reading a sample of a book for free before you buy. The grownup version will be virtual versions of tech gadgets that you can play with as if they were in your hands, along with highly accurate online avatars that will let you try on virtual clothing and truly see what it looks like and whether it fits. Here in Irvine, a nearby shopping center is slowly being shut down and transformed into a medical office complex. I take this as a sign of things to come.
  10. Personal 3D printing? I’m still not sure if and when that becomes more than a toy. At an industrial level it will certainly become a big thing, allowing us far more routine customization of consumer products that we buy online.
  11. Real, honest-to-god driverless cars that can navigate essentially anywhere and respond to sophisticated voice commands, will become reality by 2025 or 2030. See #1 for why. This will change society as profoundly as the invention of the mass-market car itself.
  12. Manned space exploration will go nowhere. We will not colonize the moon. At most, we will eventually launch a manned mission to Mars, but it will find nothing of interest beyond what unmanned probes have discovered. We gave up on manned missions to the moon after seven flights. We’ll give up on Mars after one or two. FTL travel will continue to be impossible. Thanks a lot, Einstein!
  13. We will all have plenty of body implants by and by. Bionic eyes are an obvious possibility. Bionic limbs are already good enough that their continued success barely counts as a prediction anymore. Cognitive enhancement will become mainstream, which is a good thing since we’ll need it to keep up with AI development.
  14. Russia will decline. China will keep growing and will certainly become a major world power, but growth will slow down due mostly to inexorable consequences of demographics and the decay of labor costs as a competitive advantage. Over the long term, the United States will continue to outperform them both, as well as the EU and (maybe) South America. I’m not really sure about India.
  15. Nuclear warfare? Beats me. I’d say a major exchange is unlikely, but a few minor exchanges are certainly possible. The most likely spot is the tinder keg stretching from Morocco to India, which already contains three nuclear powers and will likely contain at least two more (Iran and Saudi Arabia) within two decades.
  16. There will also be some terrorist biological attacks, but nothing catastrophic. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance and superior technology, the good guys will develop defenses faster than the bad guys can develop truly killer bugs. Whether the same can be said for natural pandemics is less clear.

As you’ve noticed, I have no predictions for art or culture, which I know little about. In any case, these subjects are far too nonlinear to say anything useful about. Not too much about politics either, though the political implications of many of the predictions are fairly obvious. Economics will undergo a sea change for the same reason it’s gone through sea changes before: the underlying world of trade and money will fundamentally change. It’s not clear if the political class will pay much attention to this, but at some point I suppose they won’t have much choice.

The corporate world, despite the endless predictions of the techno-utopians and the equally endless kvetching about slacker Millennials, won’t really change much. There will be more telecommuting, more consolidation into gigantic multinationals, and ever more sophisticated marketing, but no revolutionary changes to the basic structure of business. (The marketing part of this prediction relies largely on the fact that although big data may look like crap right now, it won’t forever, and it will intersect with ubiquitous surveillance to become either revolutionary or sinister depending on your worldview.) Patent law will either be seriously reformed or will become perhaps the most dominant and most oppressive feature of corporate R&D. Not sure which.

Media will continue to be 95 percent entertainment subsidizing a small amount of serious news, just as it’s been for centuries. Only the tech will change. Books will continue to be books. English will continue to take over the world (see #14), though it’s possible the development of accurate, idiomatic, real-time translation AI will make this a moot point. The revolution of medical tech may or may not come soon enough to affect the treatment of multiple myeloma.

Obviously I’m missing lots of stuff. Some of it is due to ignorance, some is because I’m genuinely skeptical that certain much-hyped trends are likely to pan out. However, I’m not going to tell you which is which. This will allow me to plausibly deny ignorance for anything big that I’ve stupidly left off my list.

You should feel free to offer to bet me on any of these trends, but they’re all far enough out that you’ll likely have to badger my estate for payouts. Good luck with that. This is deliberate on my part, so let’s skip the whole betting thing, OK?

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16 New Year’s Predictions That Are Not For 2015

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The 19 Best Photobooks of 2014

by AndreasD07 Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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The tide of excellent photobooks continues to rise, with new releases straining wallets and bookshelves of collectors as well as those of us who just enjoy a well-put-together body of photography. While there are worse predicaments than wondering where you’ll keep all these gems, it’s definitely been tough to keep up. Here’s a round-up of the ones that stood out to the Mother Jones photo department this year.

Night Walk & Invisible City, Ken Schles (Steidl)
Night Walk is an essential companion to the new, long-awaited reprint of Schles’ gritty 1988 classic Invisible City. A document of life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as it went through the death throes of being a dirty, lawless pocket of the city, Invisible City and Night Walk evokes a sense of danger and fun in roaming through this veritable no man’s land. The grainy black-and-white photos make you feel like you’re falling through a dream.

Frontcountry, Lucas Foglia (Nazraeli Press)
Lucas Foglia‘s second monograph looks at the intersection and conflict of mining, ranching, and environmental interests in the American West. It’s a wry, beautiful book. Unlike a lot of fine-art-oriented documentary photobooks, Frontcountry feels grounded while still serving page after page of gorgeous photos that at times feel surreal. Foglia has a knack for putting humans in their place against expansive landscapes, as well as capturing serene moments of breathlessness, waiting to exhale.

Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, Eugene Richards (Many Voices Press)
This self-published book brings together Eugene Richards’ work from the Arkansas Delta since the days he first went as there a Vista volunteer in 1969. Some of the work appeared in his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises, published in 1972. It’s a mix of classic documentary reportage of the ’60s and ’70s; the forceful, wide-angle work for which Richards became known in the ’80s; and his recent, sublime color work. A single line of text on each page opposite the photographs strings the whole thing together. It’s very lyrical, in a way you may not expect if the last Eugene Richards book you looked at was Cocaine True Cocaine Blue or even Walking Through the Ashes. Far more than a collection of Richards’ work in the Delta, Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down is about his fulfillment of a promise made to a woman he met long ago—and to himself.

Still Moving, Danny Clinch (Harry Abrams)
He would probably shun the comparison, but Danny Clinch has become something akin to this era’s Jim Marshall. He shoots plenty of great portraits, sure, but unlike a lot of music photographers who eventually abandon shooting concerts, Clinch still gets in the mix, capturing great backstage moments as well as generation-defining live moments. He’s certainly among the best living music photographers.

The Sound of Two Eyes Opening, Spot (Sinecure)
Well known to punks as the man who recorded dozens of ’80s hardcore records on SST Records and toured with their bands (namely Black Flag), it turns out Spot was also something of a shutterbug. This book gives an unflinching look at beach life in the LA area during the ’70s. Lots of girls on roller skates in short shorts and dudes in tube socks skateboarding, as well as early photos of Black Flag and the Los Angeles punk scene. It’s worth picking up the slipcase deluxe edition which comes with a poster, print, and record (available only from the publisher).

Disco Night 9/11, Peter van Agtmael (Red Hook Editions)
Disco Nights has made a number of appearances on other “Best Of” lists—for a good reason. Though it’s a pretty simple book, lacking some of the bells and whistles that other notable photobooks include, the simplicity in this case reinforces the weight of the subject and lets the photos stand out. Having covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, van Agtmael continues his coverage by following the soldiers home and photographing their struggles getting used to normal life.

War Porn, Chris Bangert (Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg)
“These are not by best pictures,” Chris Bangert writes of this uncensored, unvarnished book of photos from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This book is not about the drama of war or the phony myth of the heroic war photographer.” Rather, it’s about a photographer dealing with everything he’s seen, and the images he’s captured that linger in his mind. It’s full of the grisly, gruesome photos war photographers make but we rarely see. Editors don’t want them and often the photographers themselves don’t like to face them. All of which makes War Porn a tough little book to look at. It’s punctuated by a haunting epilogue involving Bangert’s grandfather, who served as a doctor with the Wehrmacht in Russia during World War II.

Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk (Rizzoli)
Pick this one up along with Playground, by Paul Zone (Glitterati Incorporated; I review it here) and you have an unbeatable ringside seat to the nascent days of New York City punk. Both Zone (of the Fast) and Stein (Blondie) were musicians foremost, but they seemed to always have their cameras on them, capturing the New York scene as it evolved from an eclectic group of musicians, artists, poets and filmmakers into the ground zero of American punk rock—until New Wave swept it away.

Rich and Poor, Jim Goldberg (Steidl)
Every write-up of this reprint mentions how it’s as poignant today as back in 1985 when it was published. As the title suggests, the book, shot in San Francisco from the late ’70s through the mid-’80s, is a study of the very wealthy and the very poor. In what was to become his trademark style, Jim Goldberg photographs subjects and then has them write something about themselves on the print. Of course, San Francisco is a different city now, with the income gap between rich and poor having grown to an enormous chasm. For the redesigned book, available in hardback, Goldberg added a few photos revisiting locations and people he shot for the original.

Bedrooms of the Fallen, Ashley Gilbertson (University of Chicago)
It’s a simple idea: Photograph the bedrooms of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan using a wide angle panoramic camera. The resulting images are a stirring and unsettling documentation of lives left behind. Many bedrooms show transitions—remnants of boyhoods and teenage years mixed in with the trappings of new military personas. Some of the bedrooms have been made into shrines, carefully maintained by the parents. In other images, you sense the parents slowly moving on, with boxes and household items beginning to impose on the bedroom space. The very still, voyeuristic photos draw you in slowly and hold your attention through the book.

Vietnam: The Real War, AP (Abrams)
One of the better photobooks on the Vietnam War, Vietnam: The Real War, pulls images from the AP archives to trace the history of America’s involvement in the conflict. It’s a powerful collection that includes those iconic photos that altered the war’s trajectory by changing hearts and minds back home: Malcolm Browne’s 1963 photo of the Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze, Eddie Adams’ image of the chief of the South Vietnamese national police executing a suspected Viet Cong official in the street, Nick Ut’s image of the little girl running naked, burned by napalm.

Afghanistan, Larry Towell (Aperture)
Essentially a richly detailed scrapbook of Larry Towell’s time covering Afghanistan, this reproduction of his original artist’s maquette gets under the skin of the country and into the mind of the photographer. It’s about as close to a 360-degree view of the place as a Westerner can provide. The book covers ordinary Afghans, Western and Afghan soldiers, war victims, street scenes, and political machinations. The inclusion of Towell’s notes, contact sheets, and of course, excellent images, makes this a treasure for those who like to pull back the curtain on a photographer’s process.

The Decisive Moment, Henri Cartier-Bresson (Steidl)
One of the most influential (and yet hardest to find) photobooks in print gets the Steidl gold-standard reprint treatment here. Available for the first time in sixty years, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment still sizzles with taut, kinetic energy. From the Matisse-designed cover through the tightly edited image selection, it’s a brilliant mix of street photography and reportage, photos that, despite being perfectly composed, feel very alive. Many of them have evolved from classics to cultural wallpaper. The book reminds us of Cartier-Bresson’s genius—just in case you needed a reminder.

Ponte City, Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse (Steidl)
A multi-part book about a 54-story residential building in Johannesburg that Mikhael Subotzky describes as, “a huge blinking advertising crown visible from Soweto in the south to Sandton in the north.” Built in 1976, “Ponte City” housed young professional types before falling on hard times in ’90s, as those people fled to the suburbs. Developers who bought the building in 2008 with grand plans to refurbish it went belly-up. Subotzky and Waterhouse’s book-in-a-box includes a standard hardcover photobook along with 17 pamphlet/zine type booklets, each focusing on a different aspect of the building. It’s an audacious deep-dive into Ponte City that traces its history through archival documents and photographs of those who live there.

Testament, Chris Hondros (powerhouse)
This retrospective of Chris Hondros, a photojournalist killed in Tripoli while covering the Libyan civil war, proves what a talented and courageous photographer he was. Testament, which I reviewed earlier this year, holds up as a standout. Even in volatile situations, Hondros managed to find the poignant, emotional image that often told more of what was going on than the bang-bang shot. And it’s worth mentioning that proceeds from Testament go to the Chris Hondros Fund.

Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, Paul Martineau (Getty Publications)
Fully appreciating Minor White’s images, like learning to taste the subtleties of a good wine, requires something of a learning curve. His landscapes, nudes, still lifes and street photos all bear a very classic beauty. Very fine grained, precisely printed and composed, technically perfect in nearly every way, these are photos that legions of photographers have tried to imitate. As this book makes clear, White was a tour de force, constantly seeking, always challenging himself with new projects. His impact extends well beyond his work as a photographer. He was a founder of Aperture and worked closely with Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), eventually leading the photo program there. Amid the many retrospectives of White’s career, this stands as one of the best overviews, an excellent starting point in your education on one of the world’s greatest photographers.

Superlative Light, Robert Shults (Daylight)
Superlative Light is a simple soft-cover book of black-and-white photos of the Petawatt Laser facility in Austin, Texas, that look like stills from an old sci-fi movie. It’s an unassuming project really, basic reportage about the facility that in 2009, when these photos were taken, produced the most powerful laser pulse to date. Translating something so magnificent yet so clinically mundane in such striking photos is no small feat.

The Photobook: A History, Vol. III, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger (Phaidon)
The third and final installment in a series that jump-started a recent increased interest in photobooks. Parr and Badger’s insightful series highlights books that mark significant points of evolution in the medium. From well-known masterpieces like Robert Frank’s The Americans to lesser-known books like Morten Andersen’s Fast City, the series leaves no stone unturned. This third edition focuses on photobooks published from World War II to the present.

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The 19 Best Photobooks of 2014

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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

by SamaraLetters Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Colorado gun-rights crusader Dudley Brown has a simple political philosophy: “No compromise.” He says the NRA is spineless. (An NRA official once tagged him the “Al Sharpton of the gun movement.”) He loathes middle-of-the-road politicians. For show, he occasionally drives a Pinzgauer, a bulky Austrian-made troop transport vehicle, which he describes as his “political pain delivery vehicle.” His opponents—Democrats and Republicans alike—call him “poison” and a “political terrorist.” After Democratic lawmakers in the state passed new gun-control laws in response to the Aurora and Newtown mass shootings, Brown told NPR, “There’s a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.” But, as it turns out, Brown’s bid for political revenge has upped the odds that Democrats will hold on to power in the state legislature.


How the NRA Degrades and Objectifies Women


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Spitting, Stalking, Rape Threats: How Gun Extremists Target Women


These Women Are the NRA’s Worst Nightmare


A Guide to Mass Shootings in America


The NRA Comes Out in Support of Warrior Cops


10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down

See our special reports on mass shootings and child gun deaths

Brown—who is widely referred to just as “Dudley”—is the face and voice of the absolutist gun-rights movement, which opposes any and all gun-related restrictions. A frequent guest on Fox News, Brown founded an outfit called Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO); it’s Colorado’s more extreme version of the NRA. He also runs a group called the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), which butts heads with the NRA and is allied with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Brown’s groups have spent millions lobbying state and federal politicians and trying to sway Republican primaries in favor of hard-line pro-gun candidates. As Brown’s organizations bolster their membership lists and war chests, they could play a key role in the 2016 Republican presidential primary contest—but perhaps at a price for the party. In Colorado, Brown’s take-no-prisoners tactics have splintered the state GOP. And this year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican state Senate primaries, which has boosted the chances for the Democrats in those races and given the Ds a good shot of retaining control of state Senate.

Born in Wyoming, Brown studied at Colorado State University and chaired the College Republicans of Colorado with the confrontational style that would become his trademark. “The College Republicans were having doughnuts with the College Democrats, even during Reagan’s re-election year,” Brown told Denver’s 5280 magazine. “I didn’t want to have doughnuts with them. I wanted to beat them over their heads.” After college, he kicked around state politics working for US Sen. Bill Armstrong, the state House’s GOP caucus, the Firearms Coalition of Colorado, and the Colorado Conservative Union. In 1996, he struck out on his own and formed Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

Those were the halcyon days for Colorado Republicans. They had enjoyed almost uninterrupted majorities in the state House and Senate since the 1970s. After the 1998 elections, the GOP controlled the governorship, the legislature, both US Senate seats, and four of six congressional districts. And it was conservative Republicans who were ascendant in the state. Using RMGO, Brown took aim at GOPers who did not pass his pro-gun ideological test. In one early instance, RMGO attacked a Republican congressional candidate named Don Ament, who for Brown was insufficiently pro-gun, with a mailer showing Ament purportedly leaving a Denver strip club. The mailer declared, “Send Denver Don home to his wife.” But the state Republican Party’s office was located down the street from the strip club, and the photo of Ament was a set-up. Ament lost in the Republican primary to a far-right challenger.

After the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, Colorado voters approved a ballot measure mandating that buyers at gun shows undergo a background check first. (Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had obtained their guns illegally from a straw buyer.) Bill Owens, Colorado’s newly elected Republican governor, backed the measure, putting him in Brown and RMGO’s sights. RMGO badgered Owens at public events, blitzed his office with angry mail, and bird-dogged him at public events. Sean Tonner, Owens’ deputy chief of staff, told 5280, “All Dudley wanted to do was create controversy. He makes his money when there’s turmoil, real or perceived, because that’s what gets his members to write him checks.”

But Colorado’s political landscape has shifted in the past decade. The state has attracted large numbers of young people and Hispanics, turning the state “greener and browner,” as local political consultants put it. Colorado progressives organized in the early 2000s and soon took back the legislature and the governorship. Still, gun rights (or gun safety) has remained a contentious issue, essentially a proxy battle in a changing Colorado, pitting new Coloradans against old. And Brown has capitalized on this intense fight to expand RMGO’s profile and political clout.

Brown’s controversial tactics have drawn national attention. In a 2012 GOP primary, conservatives sought to oust state Sen. Jean White, a Republican who had voted twice in favor of civil unions. So Brown and a right-wing group out of Virginia crafted a mailer showing two men kissing with the tagline, “State Senator Jean White’s idea of family values?” Here was the rub: The two men in the photo lived in New Jersey, and, through some clever editing, Brown’s team had replaced the Manhattan skyline with snowy pine trees reminiscent of Colorado. (The two men sued the conservative group that distributed the mailer; a judge ruled in April that RMGO had a right to use the photo under the First Amendment.) White ended up losing her primary to an RMGO-backed state representative and rancher named Randy Baumgardner.

As Brown stoked his supporters’ fears of gun-grabbing Democrats and as RMGO’s bank account grew, the group became a potent force in Republican primaries—and a headache to the state GOP. “He’s exactly what’s wrong with the Republican Party all rolled up into one guy,” Sean Duffy, a former spokesman for Bill Owens, told 5280. “He’ll say or do anything to destroy viable candidates and legislators who agree with him 90 percent of the time, because you’re either 100 percent with him, or you’re 100 percent against him.”

The mass shootings in 2012 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, did nothing to slow Brown. In an email blasted out to RMGO supporters, he sent condolences to the families of those affected and then attacked “the Washington, DC, gun control lobby”—calling it “circling vultures”—for “shamelessly using the blood of innocents to advance their anti-gun agenda.” When told that Aurora gunman James Holmes had 6,000 rounds with him the night he shot 70 people, killing 12, Brown replied: “I call 6,000 rounds running low.” His National Association of Gun Rights spent $6.7 million in 2013 lobbying against new gun-control measures in Congress—nearly twice what the NRA spent on lobbying. NAGR has gone far beyond the NRA in its gun-rights advocacy, fighting reauthorization of the Patriot Act (because it allows “unconstitutional” gun searches) and suing to overturn the ban on firearms in post offices. Sen. Rand Paul, who was endorsed by the NAGR in 2010, has signed fundraising appeals for the group.

This year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican primaries in crucial Colorado state Senate races in Jefferson County, west of Denver. These were major victories for the RINO-bashing RMGO. But the result could be good news for the Democrats. Had the more moderate Republicans won those primaries, political handicappers observed, the GOP would have had a good chance of winning those seats in the general election and regaining control of the Senate. (Democrats currently have a one-seat majority in the state’s upper chamber.) But with Brown-preferred (and die-hard) candidates on the ballot, Democrats may be able to eke out victories in these critical races. “Dudley Brown could be the Democrats’ savior this year,” says Laura Chapin, a Democratic consultant based in Denver.

While Brown’s brand of take-no-prisoners politics has earned him enemies in both political parties, among his fellow conservatives he’s a rock star. Last Wednesday, in a packed hotel ballroom, Brown introduced his old friend David Bossie, who runs the conservative group Citizens United, at the premiere of Bossie’s latest propaganda film, Rocky Mountain Heist. The film purports to tell the story of how a secret cabal of liberal donors hijacked Colorado beginning in the 2000s, and warns that this model could turn other states deep blue. Brown stars in the movie.

Afterward, I introduced myself to Brown and asked for an interview. The smile disappeared from his face. “I don’t talk to leftists like you,” he snarled. “My guys don’t read your crap.” He brushed past me, yelled “Pravda” over his shoulder, and moved into the crowd.

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

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Arizona State’s Chip Sarafin Just Became the First Publicly Gay Player in Major College Football

by Roderic2845 Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Arizona State University offensive lineman Edward “Chip” Sarafin revealed he is gay in a newly published magazine profile, making him the first active player in major college football to come out publicly.

Although his conversation with Compete—a Tempe-based LGBT sports magazine—marks the first time Sarafin has told his story to the media, he said he came out to his teammates last spring. “It was really personal to me,” he said, “and it benefited by peace of mind greatly.”

Sarafin, who is a fifth-year senior earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, has not played in a game in his four years as a Sun Devil. With his announcement, he follows in the steps of current St. Louis Rams linebacker Michael Sam, who came out to the media after completing his college football career at the University of Missouri, and the University of Massachusetts’ Derrick Gordon, who became the first openly gay men’s college basketball player just months ago. Sam tweeted his support shortly after the news broke:

Arizona State football coach Todd Graham had this to say about Sarafin in a statement Wednesday:

We are a brotherhood that is not defined by cultural and personal differences, but rather an individual’s commitment to the Sun Devil Way. Chip is a fifth-year senior and a Scholar Baller, a graduate and a master’s student. His commitment to service is unmatched and it is clear he is on his way to leading a successful life after his playing career, a goal that I have for every student-athlete. Diversity and acceptance are two of the pillars of our program, and he has full support from his teammates and the coaching staff.

Sarafin, who plans to become a neurologist, is currently helping develop a lightweight, sturdy carbon-fiber football helmet. He does outreach with younger athletes, educating them on the dangers of playing through concussions. He says he strives to be the type of person who “gives back to everyone and loves his family.”

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Arizona State’s Chip Sarafin Just Became the First Publicly Gay Player in Major College Football

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The Latest Court Case Didn’t End the NCAA As We Know It. The Next One Might.

by FlorianSmithers Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, a federal judge made college sports history when she ruled that the NCAA could not deny players from profiting from the use of their likenesses on TV or in video games. In doing so, Judge Claudia Wilken laid down two rules: (1) Schools can put up to $5,000 a year in a trust for athletes; and (2) they can offer more comprehensive scholarships that cover the full cost of attending college.

Many NCAA watchers have argued that the ruling in O’Bannon v. NCAA doesn’t change much, contrary to what some thought a year ago. For example, schools in the rich, successful power conferences already were moving to beef up scholarships. In the sense that the NCAA suffered a manageable setback, some have argued that it actually came out on top. But, they say, the NCAA might not be so lucky the next time around.

That’s because its upcoming legal battle could kill the governing body as we know it. Representing four former college athletes, big-time sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler is targeting the NCAA and its five biggest conferences—the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific 12, and the Southeastern—in an effort to dismantle the NCAA’s “amateur” system entirely. In a powerfully worded claim, he writes that the defendants “have lost their way far down the road of commercialism,” adding that their refusal to pay student-athletes is “illegal,” “pernicious,” and has brought “substantial damages…upon a host of college athletes whose services have yielded riches only for others.” The offering of scholarship money, he writes, is not nearly enough. “This class action is necessary to end the NCAA’s unlawful cartel, which is inconsistent with the most fundamental principles of antitrust law.”

The athletes represented in Jenkins v. NCAA—all onetime Division I basketball and football players—aren’t seeking damages, but rather an injunction that would make the status quo illegal, open up athlete compensation to market forces, and basically blow up the NCAA as currently constructed.

Michael McCann, director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire, finds that outcome unlikely. “My personal belief is that none of these cases are going to be a death blow to the NCAA,” he said over the phone. If anything, he says, the outcome of O’Bannon boosts the NCAA’s chances in the Jenkins case, especially since Wilken’s decision highlighted the limits of antitrust law and didn’t come out in favor of endorsement deals for high-profile players. “My instinct is that the NCAA probably feels better about winning the Jenkins case than it did before the O’Bannon decision.”

Still, Jenkins is by far the broadest and boldest challenge to the NCAA’s amateurism system yet, and Kessler’s involvement is an enormous boost to the cause. He’s a giant of sports law, having won the fight to secure free agency for NFL players in 1992, and his clients have included the players’ associations of the NFL and NBA, Tom Brady, and Michael Jordan. The NCAA, not to be outdone, has spent $240,000 on its congressional lobbying efforts this year, already shattering past spending records with months left to go in 2014.

Sports Illustrated‘s Andy Staples figures that the outcome of Jenkins, and the future of the NCAA, will come down to the “lifeline” Wilken tossed the NCAA: her opinion that paying college athletes more than a small amount (like $5,000 per year) could harm college sports. If the NCAA’s lawyers can make the case that fans would abandon college sports if athletes were paid pro-level salaries, the association will likely survive. If Kessler can persuade otherwise, then the NCAA as we know it could be history. “The ultimate winner,” Staples writes, “will be the one with best lawyers.”

McCann suggests, however, it may not even come to that. “This is the kind of case that could get settled,” he says. “Maybe it is resolved internally. Maybe the NCAA and conferences will get together and make some changes. The O’Bannon case took five years. This case was filed earlier this year…There may not be a resolution on this for a long time.”

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The Latest Court Case Didn’t End the NCAA As We Know It. The Next One Might.

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