Mother Jones
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Ezra Klein has read Donald Trump’s immigration plan and finds it even worse than he expected. I didn’t feel that way: it read to me like a pretty standard right-wing take on illegal immigration, with just a few added Trumpisms (Mexico will pay for the wall, we should force companies to hire Americans, etc.). But two things in Klein’s piece struck me enough to want to comment on them:
The plan would be a disaster for immigrants if enacted. But even if it’s not enacted, the plan is a disaster for the Republican Party, which is somehow going to need to co-opt Trump’s appeal to anti-immigration voters, but absolutely cannot afford to be associated, in the minds of Hispanic voters, with this document.
….When Mitt Romney embraced “self-deportation” in 2012, it was considered an awful mistake….But self-deportation is Trump’s plan, too. And Trump’s insight here is that the best way to drive unauthorized immigrants out of the country isn’t to target them. It’s to target their children and families.
On the first point, I think this ship sailed a long time ago. Maybe the Trump publicity juggernaut will aggravate things further, but I honestly don’t see how the Republican Party could appeal to Hispanics much less than it already does. The anti-immigrant rhetoric from leading Republicans has been relentless for years, and Trump is merely adding one more voice to the chorus. Will Trump’s bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall really make things any worse?
The second point is a little trickier. It’s true that Mitt Romney blew it in 2012 with the infelicitous phrase “self-deportation.” But the uproar that followed elided an important point: every immigration plan involves putting pressure on illegal immigrants in order to motivate them to (a) leave or (b) not come in the first place. There’s a sliding scale of pain involved, and liberals tend to want less while conservatives tend to want more. But both sides make use of it.
The easiest way to think of immigration control is like this:
Nobody talks about immigration like this, but it’s the thought process behind every immigration plan. Both Republicans and Democrats support E-Verify, for example, which makes it harder for immigrants who lack legal documents to get jobs. But what is this, other than a way to use economic pressure to persuade illegal immigrants to go back to Mexico? Likewise, both Democrats and Republicans support border security. Republicans may generally want more of it than Democrats, but Democrats are nonetheless willing to use increased security to raise the cost of crossing the border.
In the end, everyone uses this calculus,1 whether consciously or not. The amount of pressure—or cruelty, if you prefer—that you’re willing to employ depends on just how low a number of illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate. But no matter what that number is, if you put any pressure at all on illegal immigrants, you’re exploiting the power of self-deportation. Just don’t say it out loud, OK?
1The exception, I suppose, are the people who advocate completely open borders. But they’re a very tiny minority.
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Spoiler alert!
By Suzanne Jacobson 17 Aug 2015 4:06 pmcommentsShare
Internet dwellers, unite! The red panda, lord of all things cute, is in danger, and only we can help it.
That’s right — the smiling, red-faced stuffed animal that puts your most adorable kids and kittens to shame — is not doing so great these days, thanks to an expanding human population and all the deforestation, disease, and testy domestic dogs that come with it, The New York Times reports. Oh, and SPOILER ALERT — climate change, too.
If you’re unfamiliar with the red panda, this is all you really need to know:
It’s a (very) distant relative of the more familiar raccoon. The two parted ways on the old evolutionary road about 26 million years ago, and boy did our trash-loving night crawlers get the short end of the genetic stick:
There are currently about 10,000 wild red pandas living in the mountains between China and Nepal, and about 500 being raised in zoos around the world. And while plenty of dangers face what the 19th century French zoologist Frédéric Cuvier once called “quite the most handsome mammal in existence,” climate change could be the final nail in the panda’s cute little two-foot-long coffin.
Here’s how Elizabeth Freeman, a conservation biologist at George Mason University, explained it to The Times:
“I think down the road what may actually do them in is climate change,” Dr. Freeman said. “Because they are in such a small niche in the Himalayas, and as climate change warms that area and moves that population higher in elevation, they’re going to lose habitat probably faster than they can accommodate to climate change.”
She added, “I see them as being a critical indicator species for the health of the Himalayan ecosystem, probably more so than giant pandas.”
It’s important to note that the red panda is also a keystone species in the listicle and meme ecosystem that has come to define online animal pic culture, and it’s unclear what would happen if red pandas went extinct. Kittens could become the dominate species, sure, but puppies seem like an equally strong contender. And then, of course, there’s the possibility of a non-native species getting a foothold. People could start to think that centipedes are cute, and then what? Is that the kind of world we want to live in? Is that the kind of world we want our children to live in? Addressing climate change is now more important than ever; we have to do something — if not for the children, then for this li’l guy:
BrunswykSource:
Red Pandas Are Adorable and in Trouble
, The New York Times.
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How much plastic is in our oceans? Ask the woman trying to clean it upCarolynn Box, environmental program director of 5 Gyres, talks about what it’s like to sail across the ocean, pulling up plastic in the middle of nowhere.
How catching big waves helped turn this pro surfer into a conservationistRamon Navarro first came to the sea with his fisherman rather, found his own place on it as a surfer, and now fights to protect the coastline he loves.
What seafood is OK to eat, anyway? Ask an expertWhen it comes to sustainable seafood, you could say director of Seafood Watch Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly is the ultimate arbiter of taste.
Read this article:
Climate change could wipe out the internet’s favorite animal
Mother Jones
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Pacific Standard reports today on a recent study about learning math, but I think they bury the lede. “New research finds that when parents with math anxieties try to help their kids, their efforts could backfire,” says the headline. But here’s the text:
Remarkably, the more that math-anxious parents helped their kids with their homework, the worse the kids did on end-of-year math tests, an effect that in the worst cases cut students’ progress in math nearly in half. Meanwhile, among low-anxiety parents, the team found that parents helping their children with math homework had little to no effect on the kids’ test scores. That effect remained even after controlling for parents’ education levels, teachers’ math anxiety and ability, and other factors, such as a school’s socioeconomic status—a good indication that parents were passing their arithmetic-specific anxieties on to their kids.
In other words, forget about whether you have math anxieties or not. Don’t help your kids with their math homework, full stop. At worst, you’ll screw them up. At best, you’ll do nothing. Use the time for something more constructive, like cutting your fingernails or watching Judge Judy.
Anyway, while we’re on the subject, here’s a math story from my childhood that backs up the results of this study. I guess this would have been around first or second grade. I must have asked my father some question or another, and the upshot was that he told me about negative numbers and how one arrived at them. Some time later, I was filling out an arithmetic workbook at school, and one of the problems was something like “What is 2 – 3?” I wrote in -1, probably feeling kind of smug, and got marked down. I protested to no effect. I was supposed to say that there was no answer because you can’t subtract a bigger number from a smaller one. Thanks a lot, dad!
Is this story true? I don’t know. I swear I remember it, but it sounds kind of unlikely, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just a trick of memory? Could be, but it’s an odd thing to invent out of whole cloth. In any case, my father is no longer around to protest his innocence, so we’ll never know for sure.
Excerpt from:
Mother Jones
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As you may have heard already, the Netroots Nation gathering in Phoenix this weekend turned into quite the mess. Already suffering from a boycott for choosing the immigrant-unfriendly state of Arizona for this year’s gathering, its session with presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley was taken over completely by protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement. They chanted, they heckled, they came up on the stage, and both Sanders and O’Malley reacted like deer in headlights. David Dayen has a pretty thorough rundown of what happened here.
I won’t pretend to know very much about either the movement itself or how Sanders and O’Malley should have responded. But it did get me curious: What exactly are their demands? Luckily they have a convenient website, and if you scroll down a bit you come to a button labeled “Learn About Our Demands.” Perfect. So here they are:
We demand an end to all forms of discrimination and the full recognition of our human rights.
We demand an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people and all oppressed people.
We demand full, living wage employment for our people.
We demand decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings and an end to gentrification.
We demand an end to the school to prison pipeline & quality education for all.
We demand freedom from mass incarceration and an end to the prison industrial complex.
We demand a racial justice agenda from the White House that is inclusive of our shared fate as Black men, women, trans and gender-nonconforming people. Not My Brother’s Keeper, but Our Children’s Keeper.
We demand access to affordable healthy food for our neighborhoods.
We demand an aggressive attack against all laws, policies, and entities that disenfranchise any community from expressing themselves at the ballot.
We demand a public education system that teaches the rich history of Black people and celebrates the contributions we have made to this country and the world.
We demand the release of all U.S. political prisoners.
We demand an end to the military industrial complex that incentivizes private corporations to profit off of the death and destruction of Black and Brown communities across the globe.
At the risk of being yet another clueless white guy, I’d be curious to know how this translates into concrete initiatives. In the case of presidential candidates, the options are legislation, executive actions, more active enforcement of existing laws, and the bully pulpit. In the third bullet point, for example, are they literally asking for a full-employment bill? Or something else?
Anyway, I was curious about their specific demands, so I figured others might be too. Now that I’ve seen them, I’m still curious about how they expect this to play out. The protest at Netroots Nation probably did little except to benefit Hillary Clinton, who didn’t attend and therefore couldn’t be caught flatfooted. In addition, all of the Democratic candidates are likely to at least give more frequent shout-outs to racial issues over the next few days and weeks.
But what’s next after that?
From:
Mother Jones
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A new study suggests that growing up poor affects brain development at an early age, and those brain changes can have huge effects on academic achievement.
Researchers from Duke University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison tracked nearly 400 children and young adults in a longitudinal study over the course of six years, between 2001 and 2007. Every two years, the researchers met with the participants, whose socioeconomic backgrounds ranged from far below the poverty line to far above it.
At each meeting, the participants would undergo a brain scan, which measured the amount of gray matter in parts of the brain that are key to academic achievement: the frontal lobe (which helps with executive functioning and emotion regulation), the temporal lobe (memory and language comprehension) and the hippocampus (long-term memory). The participants also took tests designed to evaluate skills necessary to perform well academically, like visual processing, math computation, visual motor coordination, concept formation, and more.
The results, published today in JAMA Pediatrics, were striking: Kids who came from families below the poverty line exhibited “systematic structural differences” in their brains, with 7-10 percent less gray matter in the three tested areas than those children living above the poverty line. The participants below the poverty line also scored significantly lower on the academic achievement tests; the researchers estimate that 15 to 20 percent of this difference can be attributed to the differences in brain development.
The developmental changes likely come from the “environmental circumstances of poverty,” says Seth Pollak, a study co-author. He describes the problem as two-pronged: There’s a lack of things that help stimulate brain growth, like people to read to you, crayons and books, a bed in which to get good sleep. And there’s too much of the stuff that delays it: stress and crowding, not knowing where the next meal is coming from, unstable housing situations, and exposure to violence. “All these things together affecting the central nervous system,” says Pollak.
One oddly hopeful takeaway is that brain development only seemed to correlate with poverty levels for the poorest kids: There wasn’t a difference in brain development between lower-middle class kids and affluent kids. This suggests that some gains could be made by developing programs for very young children in poverty that give them some of the same cognitive stimulation and stability as their middle-class peers, including preschool and parenting programs.
This isn’t the first research to show that poverty adversely affects brain development of children. Perhaps the most well-known study, by researchers at Rice University, found that by age three, poor children hear roughly 30 million less words than their more privileged counterparts. And there’s also research showing the effects of poverty on the achievement gap: Children growing up in poor families, even when allowed to go to better schools, tend to perform worse than their middle class peers.
But the study released today was the first to connect these findings. “It was stunning to see the circle closed—the delay in brain growth explains the achievement deficit in poor children,” says Pollak. Poverty, he notes, isn’t just a social problem—it’s a biomedical one.
Original post:
Mother Jones
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Last week Wisconsin Republicans tried to sneak language into a budget bill that would have gutted the state’s open records law. Sadly for them, they got caught and had to withdraw the proposal—which, Gov. Scott Walker hastily assured us, “was never intended to inhibit transparent government in any way.” Uh huh.
This kind of sleazy behavior is hardly uncommon, but there’s one bit of it that’s equally common and even sleazier:
State Republicans have refused to disclose who inserted the language into the budget legislation, which was approved late Thursday evening. Before dropping the provisions entirely, the governor’s office said Friday it was considering changes to the proposals concerning public records law, but would not comment as to whether Walker was involved in the proposals in the first place.
Here’s my proposal for transparency in legislating: every change in every law has to be attributed to someone. There’s no virgin birth here. Someone wrote this language. Someone asked that it be inserted. Someone agreed to insert it. You have to be pretty contemptuous of your constituents to clam up and pretend that no one knows where it came from.
This kind of puerile buck-passing is way too common, and it needs to stop. Maybe if they knew their name was going to be attached, legislators would think twice before inserting egregiously self-serving crap like this.
Excerpt from:
Today’s Proposal In Legislative Transparency: You Amend It, You Own It
Mother Jones
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Greece has pressed the self-destruct button, and no one knows what will happen next. Here in California, we are debating whether to create a self-destruct button, and no one knows what will happen next.
(Did you like that segue? Huh? Did you?)
In California’s case, the self-destruct button comes in the form of SB 128, and it is both more personal and more literal than Greece’s:
The measure, which would allow terminally ill people to end their lives with a doctor’s help, passed the Senate last month on essentially a party-line vote, 23-15 — Democrats for, Republicans against.
Because the bill whips up emotion about morality based on religious beliefs and raises questions concerning medical ethics, it makes many legislators uncomfortable politically and personally.
The proposal is slated for its first Assembly hearing Tuesday in the Health Committee. But sponsors say it’s short two to five votes. Ten are needed to clear the 19-member panel.
A handful of Southern California Democrats, mostly Latinos under pressure from the Catholic Church, are withholding support.
Great. Yet another reason for me to be revolted by the Catholic Church. If they believe that suicide is a sin, that’s fine. They should forbid suicide among Catholics. But I’m not Catholic, and it’s no sin for me. So go mind your own business, folks, and represent the will of all Californians, who overwhelmingly support bringing our state into the 21st century. There is no excuse for forcing terminal patients to endure excruciating pain for months if they don’t want to. It’s time to put the Dark Ages behind us.
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Mother Jones
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The latest from China, where the stock market continues to plummet:
China has decided to suspend new stock sales and establish a market-stabilization fund aimed at fighting off the worst equities selloff in years, as concerns grow among China’s leadership that the stock-market malaise could be spreading to the other parts of the world’s second-largest economy.
…Previous steps including an interest-rate cut by the central bank have failed to impress investors, many of whom have been forced to unwind their leveraged bets as stocks continue to drop.
Chief among the decisions made is to halt new initial public offerings in a bid to preserve liquidity in an increasingly volatile market, the people said. Officials also discussed the setup of a market-stabilization fund.
Another odd move that I don’t entirely understand. Do IPOs reduce market liquidity in any significant way? Put another way: Am I missing something here, or is this just another panicky move by the Chinese authorities that’s unlikely to make things better?
Follow this link:
China Halts IPOs in Peculiar Attempt to Prop Up Stock Market
Mother Jones
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Henry Chu of the LA Times reports on how the Greek media is presenting Sunday’s upcoming vote on the bailout:
Strong emotions are in abundant supply. But impartial reporting is not.
Along with Skai TV, nearly all the mainstream press and television stations in Greece have skewed their coverage or are openly in favor of the “yes” campaign, throwing in doubt just how fair Sunday’s election will be. The snap referendum has already come under criticism for being called with too little notice by the left-wing Greek government — which is urging a “no” vote — to allow for proper campaigning and educating of voters.
….In a widely circulated examination of how the six biggest TV networks treated the rival referendum rallies Monday and Tuesday, freelance journalist Markos Petropoulos found that the pro-government “no” demonstration got about 81/2 minutes of coverage, whereas the “yes” protest received more than five times that much.
In another newscast, one network devoted 18 minutes to warnings and statements from European leaders about the breakdown of bailout negotiations with Athens and the surprise referendum announcement that had precipitated it. The Greek government’s position got two minutes.
The bias toward the “yes” side reflects the fact that many of Greece’s biggest news outlets are owned by corporate titans and other “oligarchs” whose business interests would be directly threatened by a “no” victory and the potential abandonment of the euro in favor of the drachma, Nikolas Leontopoulos said.
I suppose it’s no surprise that Greece’s corporate class is deeply unthrilled by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftist government, and would be happy to see him humiliated and tossed out of office. I assume that they also prefer the devil they know—grinding European-imposed austerity for years—to the devil they don’t—exiting the euro amid chaos and eventually rebuilding their economy with a devalued drachma. After all, they’ll stay rich either way, and sticking with their fellow European moguls probably seems the better bet by far.
Less than 48 hours to go now.
Continued:
Libros
