Category Archives: Everyone

Use Your Seat Belt!

by Lily0784ngc Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

And now, from the Department of Random Stuff, we have seat belt use in the 50 states. Christopher Ingraham writes about this today over at Wonkblog, and his map showed shockingly low seat belt use. There were quite a few areas with seat belt use around 50 percent, and more than half the country was under 70 percent. Can that be true?

To find out, I headed over to the Owellian-named Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System at the CDC and created my own map. Here it is:

This doesn’t look so bad. The Dakotas are laggards at 70 percent, but most of the country is between 75-90 percent, with 11 states over 90 percent. The national average is 86.4 percent. I sort of assumed that after all these years, seat belt use was pretty much automatic for nearly everyone, but I guess not. Especially in the Dakotas.

Continued:

Use Your Seat Belt!

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This Feminist Has a Lot of Opinions About Sex on Campus

by JannieGrose Posted on April 4, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the winter of 2015, a group of university students armed with mattresses, pillows, and petitions staged a protest at Northwestern University. The props were meant to evoke the sexual assault protests occurring on other campuses. Yet the object of these students’ ire was not a lecherous male professor or a sexually aggressive frat bro, but a feminist cultural critic and professor of media studies, Laura Kipnis.

Kipnis had just published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that the university’s newly minted code prohibiting professor-student dating infantilized students and teachers, and that university administrators should have no role in the private lives of consenting adults. She asserted that “bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square.” But “the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life.” Kipnis triggered a storm of criticism from students, and shortly afterward she was told that two graduate students had filed Title IX complaints against her, alleging her essay and subsequent statements had created a hostile environment.

Thus began a 72–day investigation that inspired her book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, published today, about sexual politics and academic freedom at universities. “If this is feminism,” Kipnis writes, “it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.”

Kipnis, the author of seven books, appears to relish taking on hard-to-win arguments. In her 2015 book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation, she posited that Hustler magazine, which once featured a woman being put through a meat grinder on its cover, belongs in the “rabble rousing tradition of political pornography,” and that Anthony Weiner is “a humiliation artist.” She has even come out against love, which she says has become the “domestic Gulags” in our work-obsessed culture. “If sex seems like work,” she jokingly chides, “clearly you’re not working hard enough at it.”

With Unwanted Advances, Kipnis has placed herself at the nexus of two contentious battles playing out on university campuses: the debate over academic free speech and the approaches universities take in handling sexual-assault claims. “I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner,” she writes, describing what she considers to be the paradoxically damaging effect of heightened consciousness about rape on college campuses. She compares closed-door, university-run sexual-assault hearings to McCarthyism and the Salem witch trials. “Zealous boundary-drawing and self-protective preciousness don’t auger well for the imaginative life,” she notes.

Kipnis knows her new book is controversial and suspects it “is going to test the limits of what can and can’t be said about the sexual and intellectual situation on campus and beyond.” I talked to Kipnis about her Title IX investigation, unwanted bedfellows (of both the intellectual and sexual variety), feminism, and the challenges of tackling these subjects.

Mother Jones: This was a really hard interview to prepare for. I kept hearing all your critics’ arguments in my head.

Laura Kipnis: I have the exact same problem. It’s a hard subject to write on because you find yourself preemptively answering the critics and then getting bogged down in some of these statistics or having to qualify what you’re saying. “Campus assault is a serious issue, but…” The chorus of voices in your head is definitely an impediment to trying to push past what the current conversation is. There is such an electrified sense around even discussing some of those things. People will automatically get accused of the victim-blaming and slut-shaming. This is why so many people are reluctant to start the conversation to begin with. You encounter all of these credential checks. Are you really a feminist? I was accused by somebody of profiteering off rape.

MJ: You say that you want to push past what the current conversation is. Where do you wish the conversation would go?

LK: On the question of women’s sexual freedom or female independence, there are still issues that haven’t been worked out. There’s an aura of traditional gender roles that is not talked about that really permeates these conversations. There is this vacillation between a desire for independence and having the kinds of sexual freedom that men have and, on the other side, issues about female vulnerability and susceptibility to male aggression and violence. We need more honesty about the actual conditions in which sex is happening. I talk about the levels of binge drinking in the last chapter. That is a symptom of something. It’s not, “We’re all just having fun here.”

MJ: Do you ever get tired of making arguments that cause so much outrage?

LK: Something I’ve been thinking about—one of those middle of the night “how to live” sort of questions—is whether you want to be someone who allows yourself to be shut up by critics, or backs down out of fear of ruffling feathers. When I wrote the first Chronicle piece, and there was first the campus protest march, then the Title IX complaints, it started seeming like there was a joint effort to shut me up. Which made me determined to write more, and not pipe down—out of orneriness if nothing else. It was the attempts to shut me up that really convinced me I was onto something.

MJ: Do you worry about people relying on sound bites to represent your argument, which is pretty complex?

LK: Making the kind of argument I am making does make you less media friendly. I do despair about having a four-minute slot on some TV show and trying to condense the type of argument I’m making in the book into the four questions you get asked. So that’s a problem. One way of dealing with this is just to stay off Twitter. Nobody young is able to do that, and when you have a book out staying off Twitter is harder. But it’s important to try to stay out of the stupid conversations. But yeah, I do feel a bit despairing in advance of trying to get points across in the four-minute media slot or the adversarial kind of situation.

MJ:Power is a common theme in your book. You talk about how students actually have a lot of power because they can get professors fired. On the other hand, there’s a kind of power I don’t think you discuss: The power to revoke mentorship, which can be devastating, particularly in graduate school. Grad students are a dime a dozen, but a good mentor is really hard to find.

LK: That’s a really interesting way of putting it. It’s always the case regardless of whether sex is involved. Mentorship can always be retracted. A grad student I know had mentorship revoked because of a student unionization effort that his professors were against, and he ended up having less of a career than he might have had. I would probably say that I would be in favor of some kind of code of best practices about situations like this. If there is a sexual relationship between a professor and a student then gets reported to the chair or something like that. That the person refrains from writing letters or being on committees that make some kind of assessment. But I think that relations between professors and grad students can be messy and not entirely boundable. Part of the problem is that those boundaries become eroticized. I don’t think people are quite so managerial with their sexuality. By suggesting that sex can be successfully regulated, we’re imposing stupidity on the issue.

MJ: You mentioned earlier that people have accused you of being a rape apologist. What do you say to them?

LK: I would say that we’re abandoning due process and being overly sentimental about this claim of victim or survivor status. There are a lot of ambiguous situations that are getting transformed into sexual-assault complaints. It’s very easy to file a sexual-assault complaint on campus and there’s very little scrutiny of the claims when they’re adjudicated. One of the other issues is that we’re mistaking a small cadre of activists for what all students are thinking on campus. There are plenty of students on campus who are not on board with all of this. There are a lot of divisions.

MJ: So what’s the way forward? Administrators aren’t going to want to appear soft on sexual assault. How could this be handled more fairly both for people making the claims and for the accused?

LK: It may be the courts. A lot of these cases are coming through from male students who have been subject to campus overreach. These cases are getting turned back by the courts. But you have to have a lot of money to bring a lawsuit. Weirdly—and this is where the politics of this becomes very confusing—it’s the right, particularly on free-speech issues, that is pushing back.

For women’s sake, I think all of these cases should be made public. Somebody mentioned to me that at their school there was some kind of report with names redacted released every week so people could see what kinds of crimes are happening. I think sexual assault should be treated this way. I’m all for redacting names. But we need to know: What were the details? What were the circumstances? To some degree that’s educational. One of the arguments would be that rather than turning toward the punishment model, we want to turn back toward the education model and transparency about what is actually happening and what is necessary to educate women in particular. It can’t only be men who are the focus of assault prevention. Women should be too. To say that that puts the blame on victims to have to prevent their own assault is crap and has to be treated as crap.

MJ: You’re a leftist. Are you worried that groups you don’t want to be associated with might appropriate your arguments?

LK: I have some worry as a leftist that the book is going to get taken up on the right by people I would not be happy to be politically affiliated with. I’m not thrilled about that possibility. Though I’ve also been pretty viciously attacked on Twitter by men’s rights activist types after making a joking remark in the first Chronicle essay about chemically castrating harassers and seizing their property. One guy threatened to cut my breasts off, among other lovely remarks. I did a lot of signaling throughout the book about my leftist feminism and made arguments consistent with that, about resource reallocation and so on. But you can’t control what stupid arguments people are going to make about your work. It’s less the MRA types who concern me, since I think of them as threatened dweebs, honestly. It’s the knee-jerkism of people closer to my own side I really despair about. I think the left-right divisions are really unclear on this. I don’t think that the forms of feminism that are prevailing on campus are left wing. It’s a conservative form of feminism in gender politics and there isn’t anything particularly progressive about it. That’s what is baffling. You’ve got conservatives acting like liberals touting free speech and due process.

MJ: Your Title IX investigation was decided in your favor, and the investigators dropped the hostile environment complaints. Did you ever worry that it wouldn’t go your way?

LK: I didn’t worry really that I was going to get fired. I did think that I could be found culpable of creating a hostile environment and that would be thrown around in the media by the accusers. I suspected they would have to throw a bone to the accusers. I did think in the back of my mind that if that happened and if I went public, which I was pretty sure I was going to do, that would create a huge academic-freedom stink. But I also thought it would put Title IX in the spotlight in terms of if it preventing free speech, and then that would become a big national issue. In my private thoughts I speculated about whether my being found culpable would move the conversation along. At this moment, so many calculations are off on what’s going to happen nationally.

MJ: Do you worry that this book will spark a new investigation?

LK: You can never predict how something will land.

See original – 

This Feminist Has a Lot of Opinions About Sex on Campus

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‘Gasland’ families are still fighting the company that leaked methane into their water.

by SoilaBroadhurst Posted on April 3, 2017

In Louisiana, more than 18 percent of households didn’t have access to healthy food in 2015 (the national average is 13 percent). In urban centers like New Orleans, there isn’t enough locally grown produce to feed everyone, especially residents.

Marianne Cufone provides a fresh take on locally grown food. In 2009, she built what she describes as a “recirculating farm” on a half-acre plot in the middle of New Orleans. Using bamboo harvested from right there in Louisiana, she set up floating rafts and towers to grow plants — tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, strawberries — in closely packed, in various arrangements around hand dug, rubber-lined fish ponds. Water cycles between the pond and the plants, so nutrients from the fish waste fertilize the plants and the plants filter the water — no dirt required!

Cufone says her farming system is both cost- and energy-efficient, too. Startup costs totaled about $6,000, mostly to install the solar panels and backup batteries that allowed the farm operations to run mostly off-grid. And farms like this could work almost anywhere, she said. “You can grow vertically, in almost any design you want. It doesn’t matter if the land is rocky or paved or even contaminated.”

Cufone’s New Orleans farm initially sold $15 food boxes through a Community Supported Agriculture program and provided produce to local stores and restaurants. In 2011, Cufone started the Recirculating Farms Coalition to promote the idea and secure better policies to help them flourish. That includes pushing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow recirculating farm produce to be certified organic.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

Continue reading here:  

‘Gasland’ families are still fighting the company that leaked methane into their water.

Posted in alo, Anchor, bamboo, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Northeastern, ONA, organic, Radius, Ringer, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on ‘Gasland’ families are still fighting the company that leaked methane into their water.

Scott Pruitt kinda sorta maybe gets that carbon dioxide contributes to warming.

by Salina5452 Posted on April 3, 2017

In Louisiana, more than 18 percent of households didn’t have access to healthy food in 2015 (the national average is 13 percent). In urban centers like New Orleans, there isn’t enough locally grown produce to feed everyone, especially residents.

Marianne Cufone provides a fresh take on locally grown food. In 2009, she built what she describes as a “recirculating farm” on a half-acre plot in the middle of New Orleans. Using bamboo harvested from right there in Louisiana, she set up floating rafts and towers to grow plants — tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, strawberries — in closely packed, in various arrangements around hand dug, rubber-lined fish ponds. Water cycles between the pond and the plants, so nutrients from the fish waste fertilize the plants and the plants filter the water — no dirt required!

Cufone says her farming system is both cost- and energy-efficient, too. Startup costs totaled about $6,000, mostly to install the solar panels and backup batteries that allowed the farm operations to run mostly off-grid. And farms like this could work almost anywhere, she said. “You can grow vertically, in almost any design you want. It doesn’t matter if the land is rocky or paved or even contaminated.”

Cufone’s New Orleans farm initially sold $15 food boxes through a Community Supported Agriculture program and provided produce to local stores and restaurants. In 2011, Cufone started the Recirculating Farms Coalition to promote the idea and secure better policies to help them flourish. That includes pushing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow recirculating farm produce to be certified organic.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

Source: 

Scott Pruitt kinda sorta maybe gets that carbon dioxide contributes to warming.

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Watch Trump’s Top White House Lawyer Cover Metallica and Journey

by RobbieSanor Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

By day, Donald F. McGahn II, who is now President Trump’s top White House lawyer, was known in and around the Beltway as a buttoned-up Republican election lawyer. By night, though, he played a different role entirely: lead guitarist in a number of bands that gigged throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

And let it be said: McGahn can shred.

Below are videos of his most recent band, Scott’s New Band, covering songs by everyone from Metallica to Cyndi Lauper to Loverboy. (That’s McGahn stage right with the hat.) The band played its last show in December, before McGahn assumed his new role as White House counsel. No word yet if McGahn, who liked to noodle on his guitar while reading campaign filings at a previous job at the Federal Election Commission, brought his six-string with him to the West Wing.

“Enter Sandman,” Metallica:

“Don’t Stop Believing,” Journey:

“Jessie’s Girl,” Rick Springfield:

“Time After Time,” Cyndi Lauper:

“You Shook Me All Night Long,” AC/DC:

Source – 

Watch Trump’s Top White House Lawyer Cover Metallica and Journey

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Cartoonist Takes On the Sketchiest President Yet

by FernandZylstra Posted on April 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Freelance illustrator Barry Blitt keeps folders and folders of Donald Trump photos on his computer—nearly 400 total, he says. “They’re pictures of him at strange angles, like from the back,” says Blitt, adding that Trump’s head looks like it is “sculpted out of some kind of pudding.” The current president, he says, makes for an endlessly fascinating muse. “I didn’t know anyone could look like that. He’s like an instruction manual for how to caricature.”

“Broken Windows” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

Born in Montreal, Blitt, 58, has been inking illustrations for the New Yorker since 1992 and has also contributed drawings to the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones. He has a knack for rendering political moments with dark humor, and the most recent presidential election has meant he’s busier than ever. His most recent cover took aim at President Trump’s frequent golf trips, showing the president lobbing balls at the White House’s shattered windows. Another cover offered a sly commentary on Russia’s influence on the election: Vladimir Putin takes the place of the magazine’s mascot, with Trump as a moth under examination.

As the reality sinks in that Trump will likely be a main subject for four more years, I talked to Blitt about capturing the president’s quirks, how he got his start, and learning to loosen up.

Mother Jones: You have a Connecticut number.

Barry Blitt: Actually I’m living in the house that Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in many years ago. Been here about a year.

MJ: Thank you for agreeing to talk. I’ve always loved your covers.

BB: Okay, well, we’ll see if you can get anything out of me.

MJ: I mentioned by e-mail that if I record our interview it’s not going anywhere outside a computer of mine.

BB: As long as it doesn’t turn up like that Milo interview or like Donald Trump’s infamous bus interview, then we’re fine.

Barry Blitt Angie Silverstein

MJ: As long as you don’t say anything about grabbing things, I think you should be good.

BB: Yeah, haven’t grabbed anything.

MJ: Just some pens and brushes I guess.

BB: I grab a lot of pens, yes. If that becomes controversial, then I’m in trouble.

MJ: Okay, here’s a softball: What brought you to cartooning and drawing?

BB: Like all kids I was plopped down in front of crayons and paper when I was quite young. My grandfather used to copy Norman Rockwell pictures, so I had him as a cheerleader. All my drawings always sort of looked funny even if I was trying to do serious stuff and express myself about grim situations. It was always cartoony.

MJ: What did you like to draw as a kid?

BB: I was drawing Popeye a lot. I was a big fan. A lot of the early work I did was sort of hero worship. I remember drawing a lot of hockey players—I’m Canadian. Hockey players and baseball players and Elton John and rock stars and stuff. Only in high school and college, I became more sarcastic and hostile.

MJ: How so?

BB: I felt it was more fun to knock people down than to build them up. I seemed to get a better reaction from my peers and from my friends when I was mocking stuff—which isn’t necessarily anything to be too proud of.

MJ: Did you aspire to be an artist?

BB: I guess for a while I thought I would be drawing caricatures in parks and stuff. I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do, actually. Cartooning didn’t seem like a real thing—it seemed like cheating. Letting a sense of humor into the process somehow seemed like an easy way out. I wouldn’t have to paint the Sistine Chapel if I could just make a joke that got a reaction—not that painting the Sistine Chapel was ever an option.

“The Boys of Autumn,” 2012 Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

MJ: Do you remember the first piece that got published?

BB: When I was a teenager, I was a rabid hockey fan—I still am—and I ended up doing illustrations for a couple of yearbooks: the Philadelphia Flyers’ and the Pittsburgh Penguins’. I got those published when I was probably 15. A friend of mine, a kid in my 10th grade class, said, “I’ll be your agent.” He typed up a letter and sent it out to a bunch of hockey teams and a couple of them responded and I think I did drawings for $25 a pop and I gave him $5. I was totally full of myself. I thought it was the greatest thing.

MJ: Hey, getting hockey teams that you like to buy your drawings is a big deal at that age.

BB: It’s true. It didn’t help me with girls or anything, but it made adolescence a little less terrible.

MJ: Should we go into your adolescence?

BB: No. Let’s stay away from all of this.

MJ: That’s totally fine. I wasn’t a really great adolescent either.

BB: I’m 58 and I’m still recovering.

MJ: Tell me about your first big break?

BB: I was getting stuff published in Toronto and I made a couple of trips to New York and brought my portfolio. It was all pen and ink and attempted funny stuff. I went to see Chris Curry at The New Yorker. It all just sort of happened organically. I’m not a good businessman and I don’t promote myself particularly well. It’s best I don’t talk to anybody lest I alienate myself. Chris was an art director there and she was using some small drawings. When Françoise Mouly, the cover-art director, was brought on, Chris arranged for me to meet with her. I really didn’t think that I had the right sensibility to be doing New Yorker covers, but I was hired.

I was doing interior color drawings for Françoise. At the end of a conversation she just happened to mention, “You know, that smoker’s cover, the sketch that you sent us, why don’t you go ahead with that? Tina Brown accepted it.”

I guess if we’re looking for a big break, that was one of them, although it almost broke me. I get so nervous often with bigger assignments—I probably drew it 10 or 15 times, the final artwork. It took a lot of art direction to get it out of me. I think it was the first issue of 1994.

MJ: What was the picture?

BB: “Resolute Smokers.” It was right around the time when smokers had to go outside to smoke, and so I had a lot of smokers standing on window ledges on high buildings in New York, stepping outside to smoke. It turned out someone else had done that idea, not only in Time but in the New Yorker in one of their black and white cartoons some years before. Now we always check.

“Resolute Smokers” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

MJ: What was it like to get a cover?

BB: Very exciting. When I saw it printed I was sort of, like I often am, “Oh, why didn’t I do this?” or, “Why did I make that that color?” That’s pretty par for the course.

MJ: I think that’s something a lot of creative people feel.

BB: Yeah. It would be nice to be satisfied once in a while, though.

MJ: It sounds like you’re on the obsessive side. Are you a perfectionist?

BB: I’m an adequatist! I would be happy with something adequate. Perfection’s out of the question.

MJ: Do you work mainly for the New Yorker now?

BB: I work for lots of different magazines. I’ve done some kids books. The New Yorker is just about my favorite magazine and it’s incredibly nice to do a cover for them. You get a lot of feedback. When you do a bad one, it’s horrific. It’s a very visible kind of venue.

MJ: How closely were you following this past election?

BB: I was sort of obsessed with it, and living and dying with every new poll that came out. I have to say that I had the sick feeling Trump would win pretty much all the way through it. Even when it seemed like Hillary had it. I went to an election party that night and everyone was really cheerful and I just thought they were crazy. By 9:30 our time, I had to leave. I felt like I was like the one guy on the airplane that knew the plane was going to crash.

“At The Wheel” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

MJ: How do you approach the task of drawing Trump? Is there any feature that you focus on?

BB: When I’m online and I see a picture I want to draw of anybody or anything, a unique angle of them or just something that looks very drawable, I slide it to my desktop and put it in a folder. It just seems like every picture of Trump is a revelation. Any angle. I didn’t know a person could look like that. His facial expressions—he really is a cartoon. He’s like an instruction manual of how to caricature someone. I mean it’s just all there.

If you’re asking me what features—obviously his hair. The back of his head is fantastic and his eyebrows are amazing. His overbite and his series of chins and the color of him and the texture. It’s amazing! He’s like an artifact. It’s an amazing head to draw and I have to think it’s got to be part of his success. It’s ready-made for public consumption.

Just look at the back of his head, any angle. There’s some angles that his chin is just, what do I mean? I mean he’s sculpted out of some kind of pudding, I think. It looks like his face is sort of melting slowly. I should talk because my face is melting quickly. He’s some kind of bizarre sculpture. There’s no one really who looks like that.

MJ: How does that compare to Hillary?

BB: Hillary’s not un-caricaturable, that’s for sure. She’s got that mouth low on her face and her eyes are kind of wide apart. I’d be much happier drawing Hillary even if there were more challenges involved with getting a likeness. I’m not sure why we should even mention Hillary now. God bless her, but I don’t know. It feels like a ship that’s sailed.

MJ: I’d love to talk through the process for one of your Trump covers. Which is your favorite?

BB: If I tell you, you’ll see how shallow I am, because the favorite one I have would be the one where he’s in a little kiddie car. The flat watercolor that I got on his jacket, I like the way the color adhered to the paper.

“Belly Flop” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

The first cover I drew of Trump was of him diving into a pool. You always remember your first. It just seemed crazy at the time that he was running and that it was actually happening and that he was insulting people. The whole thing seemed circus-like and crazy.

I remember doing a sketch of Hillary diving into a pool when she announced she was running. It was one of those diving boards where they have a secondary diving board and I had Bill on the lower board diving in as well, doing a flashier dive that was distracting from Hillary’s dive. That didn’t go, but I had that dive idea. Then when Trump started to make a splash I submitted a Trump. I remember it was him doing a cannonball. I think there was some reluctance on the New Yorker‘s part, if I’m remembering this correctly, to show him in any kind of triumphant or successful dive. Then I took that back and said, whatever, a belly flop, which suggests screwing up. That one they went with.

MJ: Tell me about your “Miss Congeniality” Trump cover.

“Miss Congeniality” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

BB: A lot of people seem to like that one. I remember Hillary brought up that beauty pageant contestant whom he had openly mocked. It seemed like an interesting way to draw him.

I don’t remember how I arrived at that during the panic that’s involved sometimes when I’ll get a call from Françoise looking for an idea: “It would be great to do something about Trump” and whatever catastrophe happened last night or this afternoon. I will get into a state of panic and scribble things and send things and somehow what I’ve sent is legible enough and the ink isn’t smeared with my tears and she’s able to see what I’ve sent her and they’ll choose something and I’ll redraw it as properly as time allows.

MJ: Let’s talk through just one more cover. The “Anything But That” cover from before the election.

“Anything But That” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

BB: I remember Françoise getting in touch with me and saying we still don’t have a cover for our politics issue, which is the issue that comes out the day before the election, kind of odd timing.

Hillary’s going to win—obviously—but we can’t really show that yet. It was sort of nice to not draw either of them. I think I had one of Uncle Sam watching with a remote in his hand. You don’t see the television and he’s reacting to what’s going on on the TV. I was sending in those kind of ideas, ones that didn’t favor or even show either candidate. It seemed funny to write headlines that obviously you’d never see, headlines of reaction and dread. I have friends who are right-wing. Most of my friends are not, but all of us were dreading the results of the election. The dread was built into this election—a little spoonful of dread. What was behind it was that it could work no matter who won. Someone pointed out to me that it looked like the person sitting next to the main figure was carrying a parachute and had a pilot’s, not a helmet, on, which really makes me laugh. I wish I had done that intentionally—they were about to leap.

MJ: What it’s like to look back on that cover now or to look at the cover the day after the election?

BB: After the election, I don’t think I was looking at that cover. I was looking at my Canadian passport, was what I was looking at. This was the first election I got to vote in also. I became a citizen a couple of years ago.

MJ: Wow, congratulations!

BB: Thanks. What was it like to look back at the cover? I’ll tell you what I always say, I wish that my verticals had lined up with it more and I wish that yellow of the background subway station had a little less line in it.

MJ: Do you think you’ll ever get tired of drawing Trump over the next four years?

BB: Yes, I probably will. I mean I’m already tired of the bullshit and not just the lying but the way he’s covered. It really seems like a low point. I’m sure this era will be remembered for a long time if there’s still time after it. Just as far as drawing him, that almost seems like the least of it. I’ve been thinking of trying to de-caricaturize him. I thought it would be fun to try and, since he’s already a caricature, to make him normal looking. I don’t know if I’ll get tired of him. It depends what he’s got in store. I don’t know how long it will be either. I don’t know how much more of this he or any of us can stand.

MJ: Maybe he’ll get a haircut.

BB: That’ll never happen!

MJ: I wanted to ask about the 2008 cover with Michelle and Barack Obama.

“The Politics of Fear” Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

BB: Mm-hmm.

MJ: A lot has been said around that but what do you think about it now, and has it changed anything about your approach to drawing political cartoons since then?

BB: It probably changed my approach for the first few days it was on newsstands. It sort of freaked me out, but not anymore. I’m still sending crazy stuff that I can’t always justify necessarily. That one attempted to be satire. I can see how people were upset by it but I knew what I was trying to do and so did the New Yorker. It was an attempt at satirizing a voice of someone who wasn’t there, who wasn’t in the picture. I don’t know if it worked or not, but on to the next one.

MJ: Speaking of going on to the next picture, I saw that you’re doing a retrospective of your work.

BB: I do, I have a book. I got a deal but I can’t say deal without thinking of Donald Trump. I’m doing a book for Riverhead. I’m putting together all my years of drawings.

MJ: What does it feel like to look over all of your work?

BB: It’s kind of horrifying, but it is what it is. Some of them are worse than you remember, some are better than you remember. It’s hard to pick a representative number of them. My deadline is around now and I’ve not been feeling well and I’m sure it’s psychosomatic. As soon as I hand the stuff off I will feel better.

A Trump sketch Courtesy of Barry Blitt

MJ: I definitely understand the psychosomatic thing. Happens to me too. Do you feel like you’ve noticed anything about yourself or your drawings when you look back at them over many, many years? Do you feel like you’ve changed?

BB: I see stylistic things. I learned that I wish I had learned more. I look at some drawings and I see I was attempting to try and be too loose and then other ones, I guess I get hung up on the stylistic side of things and the execution of the drawings.

As far as the process, I did one cover of Hillary Clinton as a fighter when she secured the nomination. I was able to sort of document in the book how that got away from me. The very first sketch I did, I made her look, not literally like a bulldog, but like a battle scarred veteran. She’s in the ring, sitting in her corner and she’s got a black eye and she looks toughened as hell. Then you see as it progresses to a tighter sketch she starts becoming a little cuter and more svelte. There was also an issue of not making her look like a battered woman that I suppose played into it. By the end of it the drawing was far too cute and it didn’t express what the first sketch was. If you can learn to convey what you express in the first rough sketch, you’re really saying what you need to say in that.

MJ: It seems like learning to trust your initial ideas is something that takes time.

BB: Right. If only, because that’s where the storytelling is, I think. I think I just learnt that now talking to you.

MJ: Oh really? What do you mean?

BB: I mean you forced me to consider what the hell I’m doing with this book. That’s what I would learn most if I would look at everything that I’ve put together. The choices for the stuff that go in the book weren’t just mine. There was an art director and a designer and editor involved. They chose a lot of sketches. We’ve got a couple of spreads of just 32 Trump attempts, attempts at Trump ideas that didn’t go anywhere. There’s probably more interesting ideas there than necessarily one finished drawing.

MJ: I always like going to retrospectives at the museum because you really do see how things move or how ideas change. I think that thinking about processes or seeing someone’s process is just very fascinating.

BB: Yeah, especially if you’ve already seen the final art. It’s incumbent on me to try and learn something from that, though.

MJ: You might get a flash of brilliance at the end.

BB: I might get a flash of self awareness, and we don’t want that.

“Whitewashing Guernica” Courtesy of Barry Blitt

MJ: Who are some artists you admire? Where do you find inspiration or what are some things that you love, that you really enjoy?

BB: I love Steve Brodner‘s work and I love John Cuneo‘s work and I love Ed Sorel‘s work. And Edel Rodriguez. Where do I get inspiration? I like John Oliver and I’ll see clips of Stephen Colbert and the Daily Show. Bill Maher. I go to right-wing sites as well, as hard as that is to stomach sometimes.

MJ: What do you love about your work?

BB: I like to make myself laugh. When I’m just sitting with a sketchbook and trying to make myself laugh or trying to come up with ideas, I try not to worry about aim right away. I’m just sort of shooting in all directions.

I will sometimes scribble things no one should ever see. Several ideas for the New Yorker, I’ve had conversations with Françoise after I’ve sent her some sketches and she doesn’t like what I’ve sent her and she said, “You didn’t have any more?” I say, “Well you know, there are a couple of other things I’ve thought of but you don’t want to see them, believe me.” She’s really an advocate for not self editing and she’s got it out of me. A couple of times things have made it to the cover, just things I thought, “There’s no way that they would do that.”

If you’re asking me what I love, it’s that point where I’m just scribbling and trying to make myself laugh and trying to outrage myself. Getting in that frame of mind where the more you laugh the more you laugh—I think that’s what I’m attempting to do. It’s just like loosening up basically.

MJ: Do you ever have someone that you show your pictures to as a base?

BB: You mean like a sounding board? Sometimes my wife, but not always. Sometimes I get precious about ideas and I’ll send them to the New Yorker first. But I can be a little precious about them sometimes. You show it to someone and if they don’t get it right away or it’s not legible and you have to explain it, then you lose confidence in it. I’m very neurotic, let’s just come out and say that, about the process. I just don’t trust myself or anyone else. That sounds healthy, huh?

MJ: No, I understand. I get really neurotic with my stories. I should send them out to more people but I protect them, like little babies.

BB: Good. Don’t send this one to anybody!

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Cartoonist Takes On the Sketchiest President Yet

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Sass, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

by MiraHarricks Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

Forty years ago, when Julia Negron was married to a rock star and addicted to heroin, ODs were so common in her household that she kept a paramedic on call. When someone nodded out, he would dispense emergency injections of naloxone, a drug with a reputation for bringing seemingly lifeless bodies back from the dead. Today, the back of Negron’s black SUV is loaded with the drug as she pulls into a Sarasota, Florida, parking lot and pops the trunk. A trickle of people approach to grab doses of the drug, which may one day revive a friend, a spouse, or a child.

Drugs Kill More People Than Cars or Guns

Naloxone, which has been around since 1971, reverses the effects of overdoses from opioids like heroin, OxyContin, and fentanyl. It has saved countless thousands of lives. Between 1996 and 2014, more than 26,000 potentially fatal overdoses were stopped, not by medical professionals, but by users, family members, or strangers who quickly administered a nasal spray or injection of naloxone. Yet it isn’t widely available in many places where the opioid epidemic has hit hardest—like Negron’s backyard.

Negron runs the Suncoast Harm Reduction Project, a scrappy group that’s pushing to make naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, more accessible in Florida. The 68-year-old “former injection drug user cleverly disguised as a nice grandma” oversees a team of about 15 volunteers, mostly stylish suburban moms whose children have struggled with drug use. They give away free naloxone and conduct trainings on how to administer it, using Facebook to announce “pop up” distributions. Negron estimates her group has given out more than 500 naloxone kits, though she doesn’t keep track. “I’m like a Johnny Appleseed who doesn’t remember how many trees he’s planted,” she says in a raspy voice. Over the past three years, her giveaway program has saved 25 lives that she knows about—and likely many more.

Negron lives near Manatee County, which has the highest number of opioid overdoses in Florida. In just three months last year, there were 550 overdoses in the county. The local morgue got so full that it had to transfer bodies to another location. “My life is spent feeling like I’m trying to stop a tornado or stick my finger in a dam,” says Mark Sylvester, a young psychiatrist who was Manatee County’s only addiction doctor until 2015. Sylvester, who also serves as Suncoast’s medical adviser, says he routinely loses three or four patients to overdoses each week.

“And yet I go to a lot of meetings and town halls and it’s like they don’t get it,” says Negron. “It’s an overdose epidemic! Why isn’t naloxone on every corner?” Naloxone is readily available in some places: Billboards throughout Ohio read, “Stop Overdoses. Carry Naloxone.” Baltimore runs a how-to website called DontDie.org. New York state prisons have given out 5,000 kits to inmates and staff members. When San Francisco was hit with a lethal batch of heroin in the fall of 2015, naloxone reversed more than 340 overdoses in four months. But it can be hard to come by in Florida. Only 11 of the state’s 400-plus police departments have officers carrying the drug. Though the state has asked local CVS and Walgreens stores to stock it, many do not. In 2014, there were 644 community programs nationwide that distributed free naloxone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There was only one distributor in Florida: Julia Negron.

I Went to a Town Hall Meeting in a County Ravaged by Opioids. What I Saw Broke My Heart.

Before Sylvester joined her group, Negron would only say that “naloxone fairies” supplied her pop-up giveaways. That’s because handing out free naloxone if you’re not a doctor is legally tricky. Under federal law, the drug can only be acquired with a prescription. To get around this, Florida and 43 other states let pharmacists sell the drug without a doctor’s order. Making naloxone available over the counter would require a lengthy review by the Food and Drug Administration. It would also require the cooperation of one of the pharmaceutical companies that make the drug, whose price has shot up more than tenfold in a decade. (Two doses cost about $150.)

Drug-related deaths have skyrocketed

A major reason naloxone is scarce in the Sunshine State is that not everyone sees it as a miracle drug. Critics say naloxone, like needle exchanges, further fuels the opioid epidemic by enabling users to overdose without consequences. “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose,” wrote Maine Gov. Paul LePage last April as he vetoed a bill that would allow pharmacists to dispense the drug.

Negron and Sylvester don’t buy the argument that stopping overdoses enables users. While some people may be saved by naloxone several times before they seek treatment, Sylvester says, “I can’t treat a dead patient.” Negron adds that the stigma surrounding addiction compounds the problem. Though drugs kill more Americans than cars or guns do, there is no equivalent of Mothers Against Drunk Driving for the parents of OD victims. “When your kid dies of an overdose,” she says, “people don’t show up with casseroles.”

Julia and Chuck Negron Courtesy of Julia Negron

Negron learned about addiction the hard way. At 12, she was put into foster care because of her mother’s barbiturate addiction. She promised herself she would never follow in her mom’s footsteps. But as an 18-year-old in the late ’60s Sunset Strip scene in West Hollywood, California, she started snorting coke and dancing at the Whisky a Go Go. It was there that she met a handsome man with big blue eyes and shaggy hair named John Densmore, the drummer in an up-and-coming band called the Doors. As Jim Morrison and other stars sang “Here Comes the Bride” at her wedding to Densmore, Negron thought to herself, “How could anything possibly go wrong?”

But things went wrong quickly. Negron soon left Densmore and took up with Berry Oakley, the bassist of the Allman Brothers Band. In 1972, while Negron was pregnant with their son, Oakley died in a motorcycle accident. As a single mother in her 20s, Negron started using the drug du jour: heroin.

In 1976, Julia Negron married Three Dog Night singer Chuck Negron, a fellow heroin user. The drug worked its way into the couple’s every waking hour. In the mornings, Julia dosed at a glitzy methadone clinic attended by the Hollywood elite, and in the afternoons she injected or snorted heroin with Chuck. They burned through money, taking out multiple mortgages and selling off furniture. Just before Negron gave birth to her second son, the couple snorted heroin in the delivery room. “We had a great marriage because every drug we got was split 50-50,” she later told People. Negron overdosed twice, waking up in a hospital bed feeling like she’d been run over by a fleet of trucks.

Meet the 33-Year-Old Genius Solving Baltimore’s Opioid Crisis

Meanwhile, the people she knew and loved “started dropping like flies.” Morrison died in 1971 from a possible drug overdose, followed by Negron’s mother a year later. “Now that I’m an old broad, I spend a lot of time thinking what it would be like to still have her and be old broads together. We would have worn Golden Girls outfits and hung out,” she says. Quietly, she adds, “That’s gone. No family.” An overdose took her sister in 1984. Her youngest son is in recovery.

Once sober, she split with Chuck and went to school to become a drug counselor. By the mid-2000s, she had become a prominent advocate of “harm reduction,” which emphasizes making illicit drug use safer so users may seek treatment. Three years ago, she moved from Los Angeles to Florida for the low taxes and the weather. Stunned by the lack of drug treatment options, she began the Suncoast Harm Reduction Project. She’s testified in support of opioid-related bills, and she made news last fall when she grilled Sen. Marco Rubio in a town hall meeting about federal funding for opioid treatment and overdose prevention drugs.

For Negron, any concerns about the legality of her operation are trumped by the avoidable overdoses she constantly hears about. “Do you mean to tell me,” she recalls the mother of one overdose victim asking her in disbelief, “that when I heard him making those noises, that if I’d had naloxone, I could have saved him?”

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Sass, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

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We Have Weird Ideas About What’s Appropriate for Kids These Days

by michelmartz136 Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Peter Holley has this story up today:

The final straw was a little girl using an iPad with the volume on high, a device her parents refused to turn down despite repeated requests from the staff at Caruso’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in Mooresville, N.C….“Finally, we had to ask them to leave,” Nunez told The Washington Post.

“That was the incident that triggered the entire thing.” “The entire thing,” as Nunez puts it, is the restaurant’s strict ban on children under the age of 5. It went into effect in January, drawing passionate applause from some diners online and angry condemnation from others.

So what does everyone think about banning small kids from an upscale restaurant? I am informally banned from commenting on stuff like this because I have no children and am therefore assumed to have no understanding of the vast stresses involved in raising kids.1 Fair enough. I’ll keep my mouth shut.

Except for this. Thirty years ago, this wouldn’t have been an issue. There were places that were appropriate for small children and places that weren’t. McDonald’s? Appropriate. Denny’s? Appropriate. That little Italian place on the corner? Maybe. How well behaved are your kids? Morton’s Steakhouse? Inappropriate. It’s a grownup place.

This distinction seems to have died out, and I’m not sure why. A lot of people think it has to do with this:

As the number of small children has declined, they all become precious snowflakes who deserves constant attention and only the best things in life. For what it’s worth, I don’t buy this. I don’t have any particular reason. It just doesn’t seem right.

And yet, the distinction between places that are appropriate for small children and those that aren’t sure seems to have gotten bolloxed up. At the same time that lots of parents take their toddlers to upscale restaurants and R-rated movies, older children are all but banned from walking alone to a nearby park lest some busybody call the cops to report this obviously reckless parental neglect.

I dunno. I’m not a parent, and my cats don’t do a damn thing I tell them. What’s going on?

1I also have no experience with the vast stresses of running a restaurant, but no one ever seems to care about that.

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We Have Weird Ideas About What’s Appropriate for Kids These Days

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Investors Are Crazy Optimistic, But For No Apparent Reason

by WendiHeaton Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Over at the Financial Times, Robin Wigglesworth has an interesting chart to show us. It’s a little hard to decipher, though, and takes some explaining. First, here’s the chart:

The pink line is “hard” economic data: employment rates, GDP growth, etc. The purple line represents “soft” data: things like consumer sentiment, purchasing manager optimism, etc. Roughly speaking, pink is how things are and purple is how people feel.

The fist thing to notice is that the hard data doesn’t bounce around very much. It mostly stays in a band between -0.5 and +0.5. (I have no idea what those numbers represent. Some kind of overall index, I imagine.) The animal spirits data, however, is like a kid’s yo-yo: it routinely shoots up and down from -1.5 to +2.0.

The second thing to notice is that these indexes mostly move in tandem. When the hard data goes up, the soft data goes way up. When the hard data goes down, the soft data goes way down. People react very strongly to even modest changes in the economy.

And then there’s 2016-17. After a modest slump, the hard data has been ambling along at zero for the past year. But starting around the election, the soft data suddenly went sky high. There’s nothing in the economic data to support this, but the Trump election seems to have filled the investor class with overwhelming optimism.

So what happens when reality sets in? There’s no special reason to think the economy is going to take off anytime soon, and Trump’s obvious bumbling will eventually sink in to everyone. At that point, the animal spirits are set to come crashing down.

What will that do to the actual economy? Maybe nothing. Maybe the actual economy really does respond solely to macro phenomena and animal spirits have nothing to do with it. That’s certainly been the case as animal spirits have skyrocketed. Then again, maybe the economy does react to animal spirits plummeting. This is not a real-life experiment I’m especially eager to see play out.

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Investors Are Crazy Optimistic, But For No Apparent Reason

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In Face of Corn Boycott, Trump Decides NAFTA Not So Bad After All

by KristanWynne Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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Mexico is threatening to use the power of corn to fight Donald Trump’s tough talk on trade:

As President Trump threatens Mexico with drastic changes on trade, its leaders are wielding corn as a weapon. Mexico’s Senate is considering legislation calling for a boycott of U.S. corn, and the government has begun negotiating with Argentina and Brazil to import corn from those nations tax-free. The threat of a boycott is Mexico’s latest and perhaps cleverest attempt to fight back against Trump, whose threats to pull out of free trade agreements and slap a 20% import tax on Mexican products have shaken confidence in Mexico’s economy.

And apparently it’s working:

The Trump administration is signaling to Congress it would seek mostly modest changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement in upcoming negotiations with Mexico and Canada, a deal President Donald Trump called a “disaster” during the campaign.

….The draft, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, talks of seeking “to improve procedures to resolve disputes,” rather than eliminating the panels. The U.S. also wouldn’t use the Nafta negotiations to deal with disputes over foreign currency policies or to hit numerical targets for bilateral trade deficits, as some trade hawks have been urging.

….Jeffrey Schott, a trade scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics…noted that a number of the proposed negotiating objectives echo provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade pact among Pacific Rim countries. Mr. Trump campaigned heavily against the TPP.

Do not underestimate the power of corn! Alternatively, maybe corn has nothing to do with it. Maybe Trump was just blathering all along and never really had any intention of getting tough with Mexico. In the end, he’ll build a few more miles of fencing, make a few modest changes to NAFTA, and then call it the greatest boon to the working man since the Wagner Act. I’ve also read a few pieces recently about China, and apparently all those Goldman Sachs folks he hired have talked Trump into backing down on a trade war there too. I guess Goldman Sachs has to be good for something.

Anyway, having given up on Mexico and China, now Trump is going after the ultra-conservatives of the House Freedom Caucus:

I’ll bet they’re scared shitless. Trump is demonstrating that his talk may be big, but he can’t make it stick. In his first two months, he’s failed on his immigration order and his health care plan, has no chance of building his wall, and has backed down on Mexico and China. His bark is unquestionably worse than his bite.

The health care bill would have flamed out in the Senate anyway. The HFC did everyone a favor by getting it off the agenda quickly so Congress could move on to important matters like cutting taxes for the rich.

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In Face of Corn Boycott, Trump Decides NAFTA Not So Bad After All

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