Tag Archives: citizen

The War on Quentin Tarantino, Arby’s, and the Cleveland Browns

by JanisUnaipon Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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A boycott against filmmaker Quentin Tarantino launched in late October by the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association has been gaining steam with police unions across the country, with groups from Philadelphia to Los Angeles urging the public to reject the Hollywood director’s movies. “New Yorkers need to send a message to this purveyor of degeneracy that he has no business coming to our city to peddle his slanderous ‘Cop Fiction,'” PBA president Patrick Lynch said at the outset. The campaign is a response to remarks that Tarantino made while participating in a peaceful march against police brutality in New York City on October 24. “When I see murder I cannot stand by,” Tarantino told reporters. “I have to call the murdered the murdered and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”

As of November 2, the national chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police is onboard with the boycott, and the National Association of Police Organizations, which represents more than 1,000 unions, has also joined in. On Tuesday, Tarantino responded in the Los Angeles Times: “All cops are not murderers. I never said that. I never even implied that,” he said, adding, “What they’re doing is pretty obvious. Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out.”

He’s just the latest. Ever since officer-involved killings became a major national issue, police union leaders have gone on the warpath, using odd boycotts and over-the-top incendiary statements to defend the ranks and push back on rising pressure for reforms. Tarantino joins a colorful list of people and places under fire from the unions. Here are six others:

Screenshot of Fairfax Fraternal Order of Police Facebook page Washington Post/Facebook

A pumpkin patch. In October, Brad Carruthers, the head of the Fraternal Order of Police chapter in Fairfax County, Virginia, called for the boycott of a local pumpkin patch after he spotted a Black Lives Matter sign in the business’s window. “This is a time in which law enforcement is the target for criticism for almost everything they do and officers are constantly questioned by the public and the media without the benefit of all the facts,” Carruthers wrote on his Facebook page, calling the display a “slap in the face” to the Fairfax County police. “The presence of this sign at Cox’s Farm helps perpetuate this kind of behavior and judgment. I know you have heard it all about a million times but the truth is that ‘All Lives Matter.'” Carruthers later took down the post, explaining that it misrepresented his intent. He told the Washington Post that he felt the Black Lives Matter movement had been “hijacked” by anti-police activists.

Arby’s. In September, police unions in Florida called for a nationwide boycott of the fast-food chain, after an officer in Pembroke Pines claimed that she was denied service while going through an Arby’s drive-thru. According to a police report on the incident, a manager told the officer that she was denied service because she was a cop. “In this case, after the clerk refused to serve the officer, the manager came up to the window laughing and said that the clerk had the right to refuse service to the officer,” John Rivera, the president of the Dade County Police Benevolent Association, said in response. “This is yet another example of the hostile treatment of our brave men and women simply because they wear a badge.” Another local union leader added, “I think the president needs to get to a podium and say ‘This needs to stop,’ that we need to put Ferguson behind us, Baltimore behind us, and we need to start treating officers with dignity and respect.” The Arby’s employee, Kenny Davenport, later explained to local reporters that he couldn’t serve the officer because he was busy with other customers and had asked for his manager’s help. The manager had made the remark as a joke. “We don’t hate cops,” Davenport said. “We don’t hate anybody. We’re just trying to get people out of the drive-thru.”

New York City. In July, the Sergeant’s Benevolent Association lambasted the city comptroller’s office after it announced a $5.9 million payout to settle the wrongful death case of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a NYPD officer last December when police confronted him on the street for illegally selling cigarettes. Union head Ed Mullins called the settlement “obscene” and “shameful,” arguing that a jury would have awarded a lower figure. “In my view, the city has chosen to abandon its fiscal responsibility to all of its citizens and genuflect to the select few who curry favor with the city government,” Mullins told the New York Post.

Screenshot of bystander’s video footage Ramsey Orta

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Last December, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict the NYPD officer who choked Garner to death, de Blasio extended his sympathy for Garner’s family and protesters, adding that he worried about the safety of his own mixed-race son. His comments were met with outrage from Patrick Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. “What police officers felt yesterday after that press conference is that they were thrown under the bus,” Lynch told reporters. The group then encouraged officers to sign a waiver it posted on its website, entitled “Don’t Insult My Sacrifice,” asking de Blasio and a city council member to not attend the funerals of fallen officers. Tensions further escalated after two NYPD officers were shot execution-style by a gunman in Brooklyn that month. Speaking from the hospital where the officers died, Lynch again railed against de Blasio: “There’s blood on many hands tonight,” he said. “Those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protest to try to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. It cannot be tolerated. That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.” During de Blasio’s visit to the same hospital, and the subsequent eulogies he gave at the officers’ funerals, hundreds of NYPD officers famously turned their backs to the mayor.

The Cleveland Browns. Ahead of a Sunday football game in December 2014, Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins entered the field wearing a shirt with the words “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford,” two young black men who were shot and killed by police in Ohio last year. During a pre-game warm-up a week earlier, Browns cornerback Johnson Bademosi had worn a shirt that read “I Can’t Breathe” in protest of the Eric Garner decision. Cleveland Police Patrolman Union president Jeff Follmer sent a letter to a local TV station demanding that the team apologize: “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium, and the Browns organization owes us an apology.”

Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins, December 14, 2014. Tony Dejak/AP

The St. Louis Rams. During team introductions at a game last November, five Rams players ran onto the field with their hands up, in a sign of support for Ferguson protesters and Michael Brown, the black 18-year-old who was shot and killed by a police officer in August 2014. The St. Louis Police Officers Association condemned the display, demanding that both the Rams and the NFL apologize, and calling for the players to be disciplined. “It is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over and over again,” the association’s business manager Jeff Roorda said. “I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours. I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products. It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do. Somebody needs to throw a flag on this play. If it’s not the NFL and the Rams, then it’ll be cops and their supporters.”

St. Louis Rams players, November 30, 2014. L.G. Patterson/AP

Cory Shaffer, Northeast Ohio Media Group

Police unions have also worked to raise money for officers involved in deadly shootings, but some of those campaigns have stirred controversy for their insensitive tone and management. After then-Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson was put on paid administrative leave for the shooting death of Michael Brown, Shield of Hope—a charity arm of the local Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 15—launched a GoFundMe campaign to accept donations from supporters. The page raised more than $234,000 before it was shut down due to a series of offensive comments posted by donors. In July, the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association launched a similar campaign for an officer who was placed on restrictive duty after shooting an unarmed 18-year-old over an attempted burglary. A flyer for the fundraiser advertised several raffle prizes, including a television and a Glock 26 pistol.

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The War on Quentin Tarantino, Arby’s, and the Cleveland Browns

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This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

by LakeshaHorowitz Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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James West/Climate Desk

At first glance, there are just two groups of presidential contenders when it comes to climate change: those who think it’s real and urgent, and those who don’t. But take a closer look, and the picture blurs. The matrix above depicts subtle differences, at least in the Republican field, in the extent to which the candidates believe the science and want to act on it. Of course, selecting each set of coordinates wasn’t an exact science—many of the White House hopefuls have a history of confused and contradictory statements on the issue. But here’s a short analysis of the candidates’ positions on global warming and an explanation of how we came up with this graph.

The Do-Nothing Denier crowd—Donald Trump, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, all Republicans—reject or aggressively downplay the science of manmade climate change, and they don’t want to do anything about it. They occupy the bottom-left corner of our matrix because they’ve called global warming a “hoax” (Trump) or “junk science” and “patently absurd” (Santorum), and have pushed dumb pseudo-science, such as Huckabee’s insistence that “a volcano in one blast will contribute more than a hundred years of human activity.” Santorum gets a little bit of a nudge to the right on our graph for saying during Wednesday’s presidential debate that “if we really want to tackle environmental problems, global warming, what we need to do is take those jobs from China and bring them back here to the United States, employ workers in this country”—which does sort of implicitly admit there’s a problem.

Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, somewhat surprisingly, is an outlier on the denial side of the matrix. He told the San Francisco Chronicle in September: “There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.” (That comment inspired California Gov. Jerry Brown to send Carson a thumb drive full of climate research.) But Carson moves up in our estimate because of his apparent support for alternative energy. Maybe it was more “thought bubble” than policy, but he said he’d like to see “more than 50 percent” clean energy by 2030. “I don’t care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative, if you have any thread of decency in you, you want to take care of the environment because you know you have to pass it on to the next generation,” he said in a separate interview.

Sure it’s real, but we shouldn’t act on it alone, or at all. That’s basically the position of our next Republican outlier, Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett-Packard. She appears to accept the science (mainly by avoiding it), but she doesn’t want to act on it, positioning herself as anti-regulation: “A single nation acting alone can make no difference at all,” she told CNBC, and therefore the United States needs to stop “destroying peoples’ livelihoods on the altar of ideology.” Fiorina’s opposition to climate action is pretty standard for the Republican pack. But her rivals have a more problematic history of tangling with the science.

Let’s move on to the “Humans Aren’t to Blame” crowd—those candidates, all Republicans, who admit that the climate is changing, but question just how much it can be attributed to humans burning fossil fuels. Take Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. He voted “yes” on a resolution declaring that climate change is real and not a hoax. He has promised to reverse President Barack Obama’s clean energy rules, but his campaign did announce a detailed energy policy that included “affordable fuel alternatives” (raising his position slightly up the “action” axis in our matrix). Still, Rubio actively casts doubt on humanity’s role in warming the planet by saying things like: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”

It could be argued that Ted Cruz belongs with the “Do-Nothing Denier” crowd on our matrix. But he at least engages in the science, somewhat. He voted in the Senate to call climate change real, but he has also called it a “pseudoscientific theory.” He subscribes to the “there’s no warming lately” theory: He told Seth Meyers that “satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever”—a statement that one climate expert criticized as “a load of claptrap…absolute bunk.” Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky acknowledges that the world is warming because of carbon, but he has also said he is “not sure anybody exactly knows why” climate change is happening. Somewhere over here is Jim Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia, who has, at times, called for acting on climate change, even if he’s not totally sure what’s causing it. “We do not know for sure how much is caused by man and how much is part of a natural cycle change,” he said in 2008, adding, “I do believe we must work toward reducing emissions…” More recently, however, Gilmore has called the goal of reducing carbon emissions “ephemeral” if China and India don’t act, too.

That brings us to a pack of Republicans with mixed histories on the issue. These candidates have at times acknowledged the science and importance of climate change, and may have even advocated steps to act on it, but they don’t want to be tarred and feathered as liberals. I’m calling them Dog-Whistlers. Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, is among this crowd. In general he says humans contribute to the globe’s warming, but he insists Obama’s policy agenda is wrong. “I think we have a responsibility to adapt to what the possibilities are without destroying our economy, without hollowing out our industrial core,” he told Bloomberg. What makes him different from Fiorina is that he previously claimed it was arrogant to assume the science was settled. And Bush’s energy policy proposes more drilling and less regulation—so not an all-star climate plan there.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie likes to brag about his state’s position as the country’s third largest solar energy producer—and did so again during Wednesday night’s CNBC presidential debate. But in 2011, Christie withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program in the Northeast. And while he believes in climate change, he hasn’t put forward any concrete proposals yet. I’m going to put Ohio governor John Kasich in this clique, too. He started off sounding pretty moderate on the issue and has historically voiced his support for climate science. But then, as a candidate, he walked his position towards the Republican mainstream by saying, “We don’t want to destroy people’s jobs, based on some theory that is not proven.” Noncommittal, at best.

Curious in the club of Republicans are South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former New York Gov. George Pataki, who have both urged action on climate change. Graham told CNN, “If I’m president of the United States, we’re going to address climate change, CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way.” He added: “When 90 percent of the doctors tell you you’ve got a problem, do you listen to the one?” Graham backed this up during the debate Wednesday by saying: “You don’t have to believe that climate change is real. I have been to the Antarctic. I have been to Alaska. I am not a scientist, and I’ve got the grades to prove it. But I’ve talked to the climatologists of the world, and 90 percent of them are telling me the greenhouse gas effect is real, that we’re heating up the planet.” Pataki was one of the driving forces behind RGGI’s creation. In 2007, he was named co-chair of the Independent Task Force on Climate Change organized by the Council on Foreign Relations and has become an advocate for climate action and green-friendly enterprise. He told the debate audience Wednesday that “one of the things that troubles me about the Republican Party is too often we question science that everyone accepts.” But Graham and Pataki are positioned lower on the matrix than the Democrats because neither of them has rolled out a clear and convincing plan explaining how they’d address climate change as president.

Now we move farther into the top right-hand quadrant, where candidates believe in science and really want to act on it. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says he would repeal Obama’s climate regulations, but he has laid out smaller-scale projects such as forest management and the energy efficiency for airlines. For the record, he has called for action to combat warming temperatures—but he is a bit squishy. In 2014 he said, “Let the scientists decide the underlying facts,” and he questioned “how much” humans actually contribute to warming. Still, he earns a place in the top-right section of the graph because of a detailed energy policy that includes wind and solar.

Three Democrats vying for the nomination—former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley—all believe in climate change, want to do something about it, and have serious plans to combat it. Experts have weighed in on the strengths and weaknesses of each of their proposals, but for the purposes of this chart, they are all in essentially the same place. Clinton has put installing a half-billion solar panels by 2020 at the heart of her clean energy policy and wants to best President Obama’s own plans by generating 33 percent of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027. Sanders has said that “we have a moral responsibility to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy and leave this planet a habitable planet for our children and our grandchildren.” He’s also described climate change as the country’s greatest national security threat. O’Malley wants to phase out fossil fuels entirely by 2050. “As president, on day one, I would use my executive power to declare the transition to a clean energy future the number one priority of our Federal Government,” he wrote in a USA Today op-ed in June.

Mapping politicians like this is always a tricky process, and some of our expert readers will no doubt disagree with these conclusions. So tell us what you think. Leave your thoughts about the candidates’ various plans in the comments below to add to the discussion.

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This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

Posted in alo, alternative energy, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Meyers, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, solar, solar panels, sustainable energy, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

by WillN98zldly Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve written a couple of posts about Marco Rubio’s debate tiff with John Harwood, which revolves around the question of how the poor and the middle class fare under Rubio’s tax plan. Harwood wanted to know why it was so much better for the rich than the middle class, and Rubio responded by saying his plan would help the very poor a lot.

In other words, Rubio declined to answer the question and instead answered a different one. But today Dylan Matthews digs into this a bit and concludes (surprise!) that Rubio’s plan probably doesn’t even help the poor all that much:

How is Rubio helping the poor so much? Well, Rubio’s plan would replace the standard deduction and personal exemption with a $2,000 credit ($4,000 for couples)….But Rubio’s proposal, as originally laid out, is not a plain old credit. It’s a fully refundable credit. Think about that for a second. Rubio’s original proposal would give any household in America $2,000 or $4,000, no questions asked. It was a basic income. It was a massive increase in the welfare state of a kind that no Democratic candidate, including Bernie Sanders, is proposing.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that when I asked his team about this, they insisted that this was a mistake, and the credit was in fact much more limited. “Rules would be tailored to ensure that our reforms would not create payments for new, non-working filers,” a Rubio aide told me in April.

It’s unclear what exactly that means….Here’s the problem, though: The Tax Foundation assumed that Rubio had proposed a basic income….Given that Rubio will not, in fact, create a massive new welfare program, this finding is pretty dubious.

How about that? Rubio misled the Tax Foundation into concluding that his plan would help the poor, and for some reason he’s never gotten around to correcting the error. In fact, he’s been aggressively touting the Tax Foundation analysis to “prove” that his plan helps the poor. He even accused John Harwood of misrepresenting his plan on national TV even though he knew perfectly well that he was the one misrepresenting his plan. If I were the Tax Foundation, I’d be pissed.

Still, I’m sure this was all an honest mistake on Rubio’s part, and he’ll rush to give the Tax Foundation updated information now that he realizes what he’s done. Right? He’s an honest young man, after all.

Right?

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Are We Allowed to Say That Marco Rubio Is Lying About His Tax Plan?

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

by JinaByles825 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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After reviewing the transcript of last night’s debate I realized I had a few leftover questions. Nothing hard. Just some simple, easy-peasy stuff:

Carly Fiorina: You say you want to reduce the tax code to three pages using normal 11-point type. I’m tired of paying our CPA every year to prepare our tax returns, so this sounds terrific. It also sounds short enough that you can produce draft legislation for us pretty quickly. How hard can three pages be? When do we get to see it?

Mike Huckabee: You say we can save Medicare by focusing on cures for four big diseases that apparently we’ve been ignoring: cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease. Since I happen to have bone cancer, this sounds like a great idea to me. In fact, I’d be OK with pauperizing the whole country in order to speed up cures for multiple myeloma. So what’s the plan? I checked out your website, but the only mention of cancer I could find was a blog post comparing Iran to cancer. This makes me concerned about how serious you are. Do you have some ideas about research priorities? How much money will you spend on this? Inquiring minds want to know.

Donald Trump: Some of your luxury resorts have policies that ban guests from carrying guns. You said you’d change this, and since you’re the boss I assume you can do it with the stroke of a pen. When are you going to do this?

Marco Rubio: You might have been confused about John Harwood’s tax question last night. I think he agrees that your tax plan is generous to the very poor. But now that we have that straight, why does your plan increase middle-class income by only 15 percent compared to 28 percent for the top earners? As he said, that really does seem kind of backward for a guy who’s so dedicated to average workers like your parents.

Ben Carson: Last night you said that our economy is doing poorly because it’s “tethered down right now with so many regulations.” But then you failed to make the obvious blimp joke. What’s up with that?

Ted Cruz: Carl Quintanilla rudely refused to let you talk about the debt ceiling even though that was what he asked you about. But it sure seemed like you had something you wanted to get off your chest about that. So: what do you think about the debt ceiling? And one other thing: are you serious about returning to the gold standard? Really?

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

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Man Hears Obama’s Speech on Addiction, Turns in a Cooler Full of Drugs

by MichellFincham Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week, President Barack Obama traveled to West Virginia, a state that leads the nation in the number of fatal drug overdoses, to announce a new federal program aimed at tackling the country’s growing opiate epidemic.

That same day, a West Virginia man was so moved by the president’s speech, WSAZ reports, that he called 911 to seek help and turn in a “cooler full of drugs.” The cooler reportedly included marijuana, 19 grams of ecstasy, and more than 150 pain killers.

He told authorities he had been watching Obama’s announcement and hoped to become sober for his mother. No charges were filed.

“We applaud this person’s self-initiated efforts and wish him well in his recovery,” a police statement read.

The man, whose name has not been released, was taken to get medical treatment. He chose to enter a rehabilitation center.

For more on the opiate crisis in West Virginia and the president’s speech, head to our previous coverage here.

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Man Hears Obama’s Speech on Addiction, Turns in a Cooler Full of Drugs

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

by Jamie01L805961 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Congress announced a budget accord on Monday night to keep the government funded for the next two years, Republicans boasted that they scored a victory against the plague of President Obama’s health care reform law by striking a section of the original law. “By eliminating the law’s auto-enrollment mandate that forces workers to automatically enroll into employer-sponsored health care coverage that they may not want or need, we will repeal another major piece of ObamaCare,” soon-departing House Speaker John Boehner crowed in a press release.

But dig into the details, and that supposed victory doesn’t amount to much in terms of policy. “It’s not a big deal,” says Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focused on health care, noting that it’s “nothing that you’ll ever notice” if the budget deal becomes law.

The provision in question is a small section from the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. It would require companies with over 200 full-time employees that offer insurance to enroll all new employees onto the company’s health plan automatically. Employees would still be able to decline the insurance if they preferred. Currently, employees usually must actively opt into employer-based health care plans.

But the auto-enrollment provision has never gone into effect. The Department of Labor has continually punted on writing the actual regulation, and all the stalling has led experts to doubt whether the policy would be implemented anytime soon—with or without this proposed budget deal. Employers expressed dissatisfaction with the rule after the Affordable Care Act became law, and confusion over auto-enrollment ran the risk of placing workers in plans they didn’t want or enrolling their spouses who already had coverage. “Employers didn’t like it, a lot of labor organizations don’t like it,” Claxton says. “And there are some messy issues associated with it. I don’t think there’s a lot of people clamoring to keep it.”

Much like the budget bill’s supposed cuts to entitlements, which leave beneficiaries largely untouched, this reversal of a portion of Obamacare will have little impact in practical terms, even if it’s likely to be used for political ends. Republicans gain a rhetorical victory they can sell to the conservative base, while Democrats don’t lose anything on the substance of the policies.

The change will help offset the costs that the budget deal added by lifting earlier caps on government spending. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that 750,000 more people would end up with insurance each year thanks to auto-enrollment. Because expenditures on employer-provided health care are exempt from taxes, auto-enrollment reduces federal tax revenue. Eliminating auto-enrollment is estimated to raise an additional $8 billion over the next decade.

But Claxton doubts the figure is that high. The CBO used acceptance rates for auto-enrollment of 401(k) plans as the baseline for its projections, he says, and decisions about health insurance are far more complicated than those about setting money aside for retirement. “Maybe it’s estimated too high,” he says. “I don’t think people should give CBO too much of a hard time about things like this, because there’s just no data to do a decent job of estimating this.”

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

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Opiates Are Killing More People in This State Than Car Accidents. Obama Wants to Change That.

by EmelyBarger Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama announced a new federal initiative to combat the country’s painkiller problem ahead of a speech on Wednesday in Charleston, West Virginia, a place at the heart of an opiate crisis. In greater Kanawha County, of the 65 people who have died from drug overdoses so far this year, 22 people have succumbed to heroin. The same number of people have died from heroin in nearby Cabell County, the epicenter of the state’s drug problem.

For the last half decade, the state has been gripped by the rise of prescription opiates and heroin, just as the rest of the country has encountered the revival of the cheap painkiller as a drug of choice. In 36 states and the District of Columbia, deaths from drug overdoses have outnumbered those from auto accidents, with West Virginia leading the way. Of the 363 drug overdoses in West Virginia so far this year, roughly 88 percent were opiate-related and included multiple substances, with 97 deaths related to heroin overdoses, according to new data from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources’ Health Statistics Center.

A crackdown on cash-only clinics for prescription painkillers and a flood of pure heroin from nearby cities have contributed to West Virginia’s drug problem. But just how bad is it?

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Opiates Are Killing More People in This State Than Car Accidents. Obama Wants to Change That.

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You play a fungus in this video game, because the apocalypse happened and almost everything is dead

by RheaPawsey1248 Posted on October 16, 2015

You play a fungus in this video game, because the apocalypse happened and almost everything is dead

By on 16 Oct 2015commentsShare

Finally, a realistic video game about the coming apocalypse.

In Mushroom 11, the world is in ruins, humans are gone, and you — a fungus — are trying to piece together what the hell happened. Now, I’m no gamer but, fungal sentience aside, this seems like a pretty believable portrayal of what would really happen if civilization takes a turn for the worse.

After all, microbes were roaming the Earth millions — and in some cases, billions — of years before we were, and they’ll be roaming it long after we’re gone. So whether it’s nuclear war, climate change, or rampant swine flu, you can bet your ass that fungi — and all their bacterial and viral friends — will be much more likely to survive whatever’s coming for us than, say, Denzel Washington, or Viggo Mortensen and that clueless kid.

Here’s more on Mushroom 11 from Motherboard:

The game revolves around playing as a blobby hunk of shroom that explores the empty Earth. You use the mouse to eliminate parts of your mass to create more, branching new bits of you in another direction. A kind of rapidly hardening Play-Doh that navigates the landscape, solving puzzles, taking on bosses, soaking up small insects and other mushrooms for points.

… Your just-sentient protagonist’s lack of self-consciousness and speech doesn’t stop the story. The narrative develops around you, the world leaving clues for you to stitch together.

The creative lead on the game is Julia Keren-Detar. She told Motherboard that she wants her next game to be about the Great Famine of 1315, which spurred a bunch of wars and caused a devastating plague that wiped out 70 percent of Europe:

“I’m only going to focus on the famine part. Keep it simple,” said Keren-Detar. “Apocalypses are these strange, fun things.”

Fun is one word for it. Personally, I wouldn’t mind turning into some “rapidly hardening Play-Doh” myself every time I think about the precarious state of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Source:

You Play a Post-Apocalyptic Fungus in ‘Mushroom 11’

, Motherboard.

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You play a fungus in this video game, because the apocalypse happened and almost everything is dead

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Heroin’s Death Toll Reaches Another Gruesome Landmark

by MellissCawthorn Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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For the first time in Virginia’s history, more people died last year from overdoses on heroin and prescription opioids than from automobile accidents. The state joins 35 others that have seen heroin and opioid deaths eclipse traffic deaths, in an alarming trend that has begun to draw attention on the presidential campaign trail.

In 2014, 728 people succumbed to heroin or opioid-related overdoses, compared to 700 people who died in car crashes. A year earlier, the statistical comparison was flipped, with the highway death toll in Virginia at 741, compared to 661 deaths from drug overdoses. The year before that, in 2012, the numbers were even more skewed toward automobile accidents, as 750 traffic deaths trumped the 504 drug overdoses in the state.

As the rate of traffic deaths drops—those 700 deaths are the fewest in a decade—the heroin overdose rate continues to climb. According to the office of Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, fatal heroin and prescription drug overdoses have increased by 57% in the last five years alone.

“This heroin and prescription drug epidemic is a public health issue, a public safety and law enforcement issue, and most importantly, it’s a family issue,” Herring’s office stated in a press release last week. “The rising and tragic death toll adds a dose of reality and a sense of urgency to our efforts and those of our local, state and federal partners.”

The rise in fatal overdoses is not limited to Virginia. In 36 states and Washington, DC, more people are dying from drug overdoses than from traffic incidents. According to the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health, more than 2 million Americans abuse prescription drugs, and the number of new heroin users has doubled in the past seven years. As opiates prescribed by physicians have become more expensive, people have turned to heroin, a cheaper option with similar effects. The Center for Disease Control reports that heroin deaths quadrupled between 2000 and 2013.

“They are addicted to prescription opiates because they are essentially the same chemical with the same effect on the brain as heroin,” CDC director Frieden said at a press conference in July. “Heroin costs roughly 5 times less than prescription opiates on the street.”

Although heroin and opioid deaths are climbing at an alarming rate, less than one percent of the US population abuses heroin, according to the CDC. That figure, however, does not include people in the military, homeless people, or prison inmates, so the true number may be higher.

Presidential candidates have had to field questions about the growing trend while on the campaign trail. At an August public forum in New Hampshire, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton expressed surprise at the prevalence of the problem.

“I have to confess—I was surprised,” Clinton said. “I did not expect that I would hear about drug abuse and substance abuse and other such challenges everywhere I went.”

In May, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed a bill designed to stymie substance abuse, and a week later expressed his frustration at what he considered a correctable issue. “This is a treatable problem,” Christie said. “And we need to be talking about it and treating it like an illness, and not like some moral failure.”

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, whose daughter died in 2009 after years of drug and alcohol abuse, argued against imprisoning people for their drug problems. “Drug addition shouldn’t be criminalized,” Fiorina told a group of reporters during a conference call in May. “We need to treat it appropriately.”

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Heroin’s Death Toll Reaches Another Gruesome Landmark

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Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

by NatishaConnah Posted on October 13, 2015

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio speaks on stage during the Global Citizen Festival. John Taggart/Reuters

Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

By on 13 Oct 2015commentsShare

Americans may not be very good at avoiding environmental devastation, but we are phenomenal at profiting from it.

Remember that Volkswagen scandal? The one where every nostalgic flower child’s favorite car company betrayed the world by cheating on emissions tests, dumping hundreds of thousands of secret pollutants into an already toxic atmosphere, and causing millions in healthcare damages? I’m guessing you do, because it literally just happened. And yet, Hollywood is already all over it.

Paramount just acquired the rights to a book about the scandal that has yet to be written, Variety reports. And, of course, our good friend and noted Earth lover Leo DiCaprio is already on board to produce, along with Jennifer Davisson Killoran. No other big names are attached to the film yet, but one can only hope that wood nymph Shailene Woodley shows up as a duped Volkswagen owner ready to let her inner rage monster out, and Werner Herzog flexes his acting muscles as a heartless Volkswagen executive. Throw in a little Rosario Dawson as a badass environmental activist, and you’ve got yourself a blockbuster hit.

Teasing aside, it’s actually pretty cool that Hollywood wants to immortalize this travesty. When Grist spoke with veritable film buff and environmental activist Narayana Angulo earlier this summer, he bemoaned the lack of narrative films about environmental issues. There are plenty of documentaries out there, he said, but not much in the way of feature films.

So good for you, Paramount. Way to recognize that it doesn’t make sense to just make sequels, prequels, and remakes until our eyes fall out and the world ends, while the actual end of the world is providing SO MUCH free material. And hey — most people will eventually just be going to the movies for the hopped up A/C, anyway. Perhaps by that point, they’ll find comfort in watching more attractive people conquer what, in their own lives, have become insurmountable problems.

Source:

Leonardo DiCaprio to Produce Movie on Volkswagen Scandal

, Variety.

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