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Obama May Overhaul the Immigration Program That Detains Americans and Turns Cops Into Federal Agents

by cursvalutarpezile Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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As early as this week, President Barack Obama is expected to announce an executive order that would give some 5 million undocumented immigrants a respite from deportation. Part of the order, according to early reports, will involve reforms to Secure Communities, a program that requires police to share arrestees’ fingerprints with federal immigration officials, who can turn around and use the information to deport suspects who are here illegally. Change would a good thing, here, because while the program—which began in 2008 under President George W. Bush and was expanded under Obama—has deported some serious criminals, it has screwed over a lot of other people. From the start, immigrant rights organizations slammed “S-Comm” as a costly, ineffective program that tramples on people’s civil liberties. Even Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson has suggested that it may need an overhaul. Here’s a rundown of what the program does—and why so many people hate it.

S-Comm sweeps up serious criminals… When local police book someone, that person’s fingerprints are transmitted to the FBI to determine whether the arrestee is a fugitive or a former convict. Under Secure Communities, those prints go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which checks to see whether the suspect is undocumented. If so, it orders the local cops to detain him or her for potential deportation. More than 3,000 American counties now participate. Of the more than 2 million immigrants deported on Obama’s watch, more than 306,000 came to the feds’ attention through Secure Communities, which has led to the deportation of more than 288,000 convicted criminals.

And immigrants just trying to live and work… Local police share fingerprints with ICE when a suspect is arrested—not convicted. Which means that even though the purported aim is to deport criminals, people who are never charged or convicted often get the boot. “Federal officials have held people whose worst alleged violation was selling tamales without a permit or having a barking dog,” California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said last year. “Even crime victims have been deported.” More from Elise Foley of the Huffington Post:

The program has ensnared parents driving without a license because they need to work and can’t get authorization to drive in their state. It has caught young people arrested for small levels of drug possession. Many of those caught are people who have previously been deported but came back to the US to work or be with their families—immigrants who could be aided by a policy that put less emphasis on deporting repeat immigration law violators.

Of the people deported through S-Comm between 2008 and 2013, 21 percent were never convicted of a crime.

And American citizens… According to a 2011 study by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, thousands of United States citizens have been swept up by S-Comm—something the study’s authors hadn’t anticipated. “What we’re finding is that ICE is arresting and then investigating,” one of the authors informed a reporter. If you’re brown, you’d better watch your back. The same study found that 93 percent of the arrestees ordered to be detained by ICE were Latino, even though Latinos make up about 77 percent of undocumented immigrants in the United States. “There is a concern that police officers working in areas that have Secure Communities in their local jails may have an incentive…to make pretextual arrests of persons they suspect to be in violation of immigration laws,” notes the Immigration Policy Center. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have urged the White House to scrap the program entirely.

But it doesn’t reduce crime: The program has had “no observable effect on the overall crime rate,” according to a study released in early September.

In fact, it may actually make your community less safe… Research has shown that undocumented immigrants living in counties that participate in Secure Communities are afraid to report crimes or come forward as witnesses for fear of deportation.

And it’s costing you money: The program requires local authorities to hold arrestees longer than they otherwise would, meaning a higher bill for taxpayers. For example, Secure Communities cost Los Angeles County law enforcement an extra $26 million per year, according to a 2012 report. Washington state’s King County determined that it cost county taxpayers $3 million annually.

By the way, S-Comm was supposed to be optional: The Department of Homeland Security—ICE’s parent agency—originally touted S-Comm as voluntary—states and localities could opt out. But in late 2010, after numerous jurisdictions chose to do just that, ICE made it clear that was virtually impossible. Because the FBI already gets the fingerprints for arrestees, ICE can access them regardless. In 2011, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) demanded an investigation into whether DHS intentionally misled the public. “I believe some of these false and misleading statements…were made recklessly, knowing that the statements were ambiguous and likely to create confusion,” she wrote in a letter to DHS. Some localities have devised other ways to limit their cooperation with ICE. A total of 59 jurisdictions have said they will no longer comply with ICE requests to hold detainees so that the feds can come pick them up. Two states—California and Connecticut—have enacted measures prohibiting law enforcement from honoring ICE requests to hold immigrants unless those people have committed serious crimes.

So how might the administration fix this thing? We won’t know the details until Obama makes his executive order, but Vox‘s Dara Lind reported in May that one option being considered was to limit the program to so-called Level 1 criminals—those who have committed one “aggravated felony” or two felonies. However, Lind notes, “independent data shows that immigrants can be labeled Level 1 criminals for everything from disturbing the peace to cashing a check with insufficient funds.” In any case, such a change could mean 20,000 to 50,000 fewer deportations per year.

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Obama May Overhaul the Immigration Program That Detains Americans and Turns Cops Into Federal Agents

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California Voters Helped Kick Off the Prison Boom. They Just Took a Huge Step Toward Ending It.

by JacobRaphael Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Voters in the birthplace of mass incarceration just gave it a major blow. With California’s passage of Proposition 47, which reclassifies nonviolent crimes previously considered felonies—think simple drug possession or petty theft—as misdemeanors, some 40,000 fewer people will be convicted of felonies each year. Thousands of prisoners could be set free. People with certain kinds of felonies on their records can now apply to have them removed.

The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the reforms will save California hundreds of millions of dollars annually, money that will be reinvested in school truancy and dropout prevention, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and victim services.

The proposition’s passage represents a pendulum swing: Just two decades ago, California overwhelmingly passed a three-strikes ballot initiative that would go on to send people to prison for life for stealing tube socks and other minor offenses. Last night, the state’s voters turned back the dial.

The new law requires the savings from reducing prison rolls to be reinvested into other areas that could, in the long-term, further reduce the prison population. Take dropout prevention: Half of the nation’s dropouts are jobless, and according to a 2006 study by the Gates Foundation, and they are more than eight times as likely to get locked up.

The same goes for increased funding to aid the mentally ill. In California, the number of mentally ill prisoners has doubled over the last 14 years. Mentally ill inmates in state prisons serve an average of 15 months longer. Lockups have become our country’s go-to provider of mental health care: the nation’s three largest mental health providers are jails. There are ten times as many mentally ill people behind bars as in state hospitals. Sixteen percent of inmates have a severe mental illness like schizophrenia, which is two and a half times the rate in the early 1980s. Prop 47 will provide more money for mental health programs that have been proven to drop incarceration rates. For example, when Nevada County, California started an Assisted Outpatient Treatment program, average jail times for the mentally ill dropped from 521 days to just 17.

Keeping drug users out of prison and putting more money into drug treatment is probably the most commonsense change that will come out of the measure. Sixteen percent of state prisoners and half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses. Yet there is growing evidence that incarceration does not reduce drug addiction. And while 65 percent of US inmates are drug addicts, only 11 percent receive treatment in prison. Alternatives exist: a pilot project in Hawaii suggested that drug offenders given probation over being sent to prison were half as likely to be arrested for a new crime and 70 percent less likely to use drugs.

California’s vote comes at a time when it seems more and more Americans are questioning how often—and for how long—our justice system incarcerates criminals. Last year, a poll of, yes, Texas Republicans showed that 81% favored treatment over prison for drug offenders. The passage of Prop 47 is yet another example that prison reform is no longer a partisan issue. The largest single backer of the ballot measure was Bradley Wayne Hughes Jr., a conservative multimillionaire who has been a major financial supporter of Republicans and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. His donation of $1.3 million was second only to contributions from George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center.

The passage of Prop 47 might inspire campaigners to put prison on the ballot in other states. It might also push lawmakers to realize they can ease the penal code on their own without voters skewering them for letting nonviolent people out of prison—and keeping them out.

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California Voters Helped Kick Off the Prison Boom. They Just Took a Huge Step Toward Ending It.

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Holy sh*t, a town in Texas just banned fracking

by AlysaFernandes Posted on November 5, 2014

Holy sh*t, a town in Texas just banned fracking

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5 Nov 2014 3:31 PM

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This was the year of the fracking ban, at least in local elections: Eight municipal and county-wide bans went to voters in Ohio, Texas, and California on Nov. 4. Considering the money poured in by the opposition, they did pretty darn well: Four out of eight won by a country mile.

California 

Happily for local farmers like Paul Hain, San Benito County’s moratorium on “high-intensity petroleum operations” passed with flying colors (at least by American standards): 57 to 43 percent. And in Mendocino County, Measure S won with even more of the vote: 67 to 33 percent.

In oil-rich Santa Barbara County, however, where oil and gas interests poured nearly $6 million into their campaign against Measure P, the ban lost by margins just as wide: 37 to 63 percent. It’s a big loss for the folks behind the measure, but, as they posted on Facebook, they’re hardly defeated: “This campaign was the beginning of the fight. Not the end!!”

Ohio

Four Ohio towns put fracking bans to voters, too, and one of them took home the gold: Athens, whose citizens had tried and failed to get a measure on the ballot in 2013, overwhelmingly supported one this time that will keep the practice out of city limits. The bans failed in Gates Mills and Kent, though. And while anti-fracking campaigners in Youngstown gave it a fourth shot, after a third proposed ban failed last year, it got royally slammed again. Argh.

Texas

But perhaps the most meaningful results cane from Denton, Texas: The town’s fracking ban is the first ever to pass in Texas, the nation’s biggest oil and gas producer (California was No. 3 in crude last year). Denton already has 275 fracking wells, so a moratorium on the practice here says a whole heck of a lot about the future of fracking — and, dare we dream, of fossil fuels?

Denton Mayor Chris Watts anticipated this, claiming that “the vote is not the end of the story.” Oil companies will probably contest it in court, but, he said in a statement, “The City Council will exercise the legal remedies that are available to us should the ordinance be challenged.”

Bring it, Texas Oil, bring it. The people have spoken.

Source:
Record Number of Anti-Fracking Measures on Nov. 4 Ballots

, Inside Climate News.

Why Oil And Gas Giants Are Trying To Buy Three Local Elections In California

, Think Progress.

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Holy sh*t, a town in Texas just banned fracking

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From GMOs To Soda Taxes, Here’s What the Election Means For Your Fridge

by LucaDavison Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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States and localities nationwide voted yesterday on a host of hot-button food and agriculture issues, from GMO labeling to soda taxes to food stamps. The outcomes of these contests have major implications for policy—and your dinner plate. Here’s a roundup of how they shook out:

Colorado Proposition 105: This statewide ballot initiative pushed for the labeling of genetically modified foods, requiring most GM foods to bear a label reading, “produced with genetic engineering.” Burrito chain Chipotle and Whole Foods came out in support of the measure, while agribusiness giants Monsanto, PepsiCo and Kraft came out against it. (Unsurprisingly, 105’s opponents raised more than $12 million—many times what supporters brought in.) Outcome: Colorado voters resoundingly rejected Prop 105, with nearly 70% of voters voting no.

Oregon Measure 92: This ballot measure was nearly identical to Colorado’s, requiring foods with GMO ingredients to be labeled. Like in Colorado, Big Ag mobilized big-time against Measure 92, raising more than $16 million. But 92’s supporters—including Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps—raised an impressive $8 million. Outcome: Undecided

San Francisco Measure E and Berkeley Measure D: These two Bay Area cities both considered levying taxes on sugary beverages. San Francisco’s Measure E proposed a two-cent per ounce tax, while Berkeley’s Measure D proposed one-cent per ounce. Both races were considered something of a last stand for the soda tax—if it couldn’t pass in these two bastions of liberalism and healthy living, it was essentially doomed everywhere else. No surprise, then, that Big Soda spent more than $7 million in San Francisco and over $1.7 million in Berkeley (population: 117,000) to defeat the measures. Outcome: Failing to gain the necessary two-thirds supermajority, the San Francisco soda tax failed. Berkeley’s is undecided.

Maui County, Hawaii, GMO Moratorium Bill: Hawaii’s Maui County—which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai and Molokai—considered one of the strongest anti-GMO bills ever: a complete moratorium on the cultivation of genetically engineered crops until studies conclusively prove they are safe. Agriculture is big business on Maui: the island is a major producer of sugarcane, coffee, and pineapple, among other things. Monsanto is among the companies operating farms in Maui County, and this bill would’ve effectively shut it down. (Under the law, farmers knowingly cultivating GMOs would get hit with a $50,000 per day fine.) Opponents raised nearly $8 million against the measure, making it the most expensive campaign in state history. Outcome: Undecided

Florida Second Congressional District: Rep. Steve Southerland, a tea party darling, faced Democrat Gwen Graham in his attempt to get re-elected in this Florida Panhandle district. Last year, Southerland attempted to pass legislation that would’ve cut $39 billion in food stamp funding, forcing millions out of the program. (He called the cuts “the defining moral issue of our time.”) Widely considered the most sweeping cuts in decades, they were not passed, and made Southerland an extremely vulnerable incumbent. Outcome: In a rare House flip for Democrats, Rep. Southerland was defeated by Democrat Gwen Graham.

Kansas Senate: Pat Roberts, the three-term Republican Senator from Kansas, faced independent challenger Greg Orman in a surprisingly tight race for this deep-red state. The race was considered a key indicator of the GOP’s Senate hopes, and important for agriculture too: Roberts had said that in the event of a Republican majority, he would be Senate Agriculture Committee Chair—given that he won his own contest, of course. Roberts, once considered a “savior” of food stamp programs, attempted to cut $36 billion from the program last year, and would certainly advocate for similar policy as chairman. Outcome: Roberts won re-election, and the GOP won the Senate majority. Look for Chairman Roberts in 2015.

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From GMOs To Soda Taxes, Here’s What the Election Means For Your Fridge

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5 Reasons Your Poll Worker Might Be Totally Clueless

by Emily Collins Posted on November 4, 2014

Mother Jones

During his acceptance speech after winning reelection, President Barack Obama thanked voters who endured hours-long long lines to cast their ballots. “By the way,” he added, “we have to fix that.” Trying to make good on that promise, Obama created a presidential commission that spent months digging into the dysfunctional American voting system. One of its many conclusions was, to put it bluntly, that the nation’s poll workers suck. As the report noted, “One of the signal weaknesses of the system of election administration in the United States is the absence of a dependable, well-trained trained corps of poll workers.”

Poll workers, most of whom are volunteers (who typically receive a small stipend), have immense power that far surpasses their standing in the local election bureaucracy. They often make decisions about whether an individual can vote and whether that vote actually gets counted—recall the infamous Florida “hanging chads” during the 2000 presidential election recount. Often they make these decisions poorly, and the people who bear the brunt of those bad decisions are disproportionately African-American and Latino, who often face chronically understaffed polling stations that lack trained workers and those who are bilingual.

If things are running less than smoothly at your polling place today, here are five reasons why the poll workers at your precinct might be clueless:

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5 Reasons Your Poll Worker Might Be Totally Clueless

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SWAT Teams Keep Killing Innocent People in Their Homes

by VirgieBenjafiel Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today, 85 percent of SWAT operations target private residences. When heavily-armed policemen conduct raids at peoples’ homes, they often go in expecting a fight from hardened criminals—but sometimes they’re wrong. Here are a few cases where botched SWAT raids ended in tragedy:

Bounkham Phonesavanh

Curtis Compton/ZUMA Press

One night last May, 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh (“Bou Bou”) was sleeping in the Atlanta home of relatives. Around 2 a.m., a SWAT team arrived to arrest Bou Bou’s 30-year-old cousin, an alleged drug dealer. Officers threw a flash-bang grenade into the room where Bou Bou was sleeping. It landed in his crib and exploded under his pillow, giving him third-degree burns and injuries so severe he was put in a medically-induced coma. While Bou Bou’s injuries remain severe, he’s expected to survive. The Habersham County Sheriff expressed deep regret but insisted his men were simply following procedure. Earlier this month, a jury cleared them of wrongdoing.

Jose Guerena

On the morning of May 5, 2011, in Tuscon, Arizona, a SWAT team assembled outside the home of 26-year-old Jose Guerena. A former Marine who served in Iraq; Guerena had just come home from working the night shift at the copper mine. Local law enforcement believed Guerena was involved in a drug distribution operation with his brothers. Woken up by his wife, who thought she heard burglars, Guerena went outside with an AR-15 rifle to investigate. He was shot 60 times and died before the SWAT team allowed paramedics to help. After his widow sued, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department agreed to a $3.4 million settlement in 2013.

Eurie Stamps

On the night of January 4, 2011, Eurie Stamps, a 68-year-old grandfather of 12, was watching a basketball game in his Framingham, Massachusetts, home. A SWAT unit was staking out his home and had already arrested his 20-year-old stepson outside. Despite having booked their suspect, the SWAT team raided the house. Officer Paul Duncan forced Stamps to lie face down on the ground. While Stamp was complying, Duncan allegedly tripped, causing his gun to go off and kill Stamps. Duncan was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Tarika Wilson

On January 4, 2008, a SWAT team arrived in the Lima, Ohio, home of 26-year-old Tarika Wilson. The team was looking for her boyfriend, who was suspected of dealing drugs. They broke through the front door and soon opened fire, killing Wilson and injuring her 14-month-old son, whom she was holding. Sgt. Joe Chavalia, who shot and killed her, was placed on paid leave and later cleared of wrongdoing.

Aiyana Stanley-Jones

Mandi Wright/Detroit Free Press

On May 16, 2010, a Detroit SWAT crew arrived at the home of seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, with a TV crew from the A&E network trailing them to film a show. They were looking for Chauncey Owens, who allegedly shot a teenager two days before. He was upstairs, but Aiyana was sleeping on the living room couch. The front door was unlocked, but the team busted open the door. Soon after, Officer Joseph Weekly’s gun went off, sending a bullet through Aiyana’s head. She died shortly afterward. Weekly is currently being tried for felony involuntary manslaughter; he claims it was an accident.

Dogs

In the past few years, SWAT teams have shot and killed dogs in Minnesota, North Carolina, Missouri, and California. In almost every case, officers have insisted that they felt threatened by the dogs. Pet owners have responded that their dogs were simply startled when SWAT teams broke in—often unannounced—to their homes, and denied that the dogs attacked officers. Take the case of Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, a quiet D.C. suburb. On the evening of July 29, 2008, a Prince George’s County SWAT team burst into Calvo’s home, responding to a report of a package of marijuana on the doorstep. Upon entering, the officers shot and killed the family’s two Lab retrievers, handcuffed Calvo, his wife, and his mother-in-law, and then forced them to the ground. Police later found that Calvo had been targeted in a scheme in which drug dealers used the homes of unsuspecting people as pickup points for drugs.

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SWAT Teams Keep Killing Innocent People in Their Homes

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Texas Just Won the Right to Disenfranchise 600,000 People. It’s Not the First Time.

by JoanSanderz Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas’ harsh voter ID law could remain in effect for the upcoming midterm elections, potentially disenfranchising some 600,000 mostly black and Latino voters. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the law may be “purposefully discriminatory” and warned that it “likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.” And Ginsburg noted that Texas’ 2011 law falls in line with the state’s long history of discriminatory voting laws. Here is a look at that history, based on expert testimony by Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history at Clemson University, and Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

1865: Voter intimidation. Beginning with emancipation, African Americans in Texas were regularly denied the right to vote, through intimidation and violence, including lynching.

1895: The first all-white primaries begin. In the mid-1890s, Texas legislators pushed a law requiring political parties to hold primaries and allowing those political parties to set racist qualifications for who could participate.

1902: The poll tax. The Legislature added a poll tax to Texas’ constitution in 1902, requiring voters to pay a fee to register to vote and to show their receipt of payment in order to cast a ballot. The poll tax was equivalent to most of a day’s wage for many black and Mexican workers—roughly $15.48 in today’s dollars.

1905: Texas formalizes its all-white primary system. The Terrell Election Law of 1905 made official the all-white primary system, encouraging both main political parties and county election officials to adopt voting requirements that explicitly banned minorities from voting in primaries. The stated purpose of the law? Preventing voter fraud.

1918: Texas enacts an anti-immigrant voting law. The legislation banned interpreters at the polls and forbade naturalized citizens from receiving assistance from election judges unless they had been citizens for 21 years.

1922: Texas tries a new type of all-white primary. In 1918, black voters in Texas successfully challenged a nonpartisan all-white primary system in Waco. The state Legislature got around this snag by enacting a law banning blacks from all Democratic primaries. Because the Democratic Party was dominant in the South at the time, the candidate it selected through its primary would inevitably win the general election. Anyone voting in the party’s primary had to prove “I am white and I am a Democrat.”

1927: Texas tries a third type of all-white primary. After the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ all-white Democratic primaries, the Legislature got crafty again, passing a new law that allowed political parties—instead of the state government—to determine who could vote in party primaries. The Texas Democratic Party promptly adopted a resolution that only whites could vote.

1932: Texas tries again. In 1932, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ white primaries once more. In response, the Democratic state convention adopted a rule keeping nonwhites out of primaries. The high court initially upheld the new system.

1944: And again. The high court eventually overturned the convention-based white primary system in 1944, but party leaders could still ensure that county officials were elected by whites. A nonparty county political organization called the Jaybird Democratic Association had for decades screened candidates for nomination without allowing nonwhites to participate. The Supreme Court only invalidated the practice in 1953.

1963: Long live the poll tax! In the middle of the civil rights era, Texans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have ended the poll tax. Efforts to repeal the tax were labeled a communist plot by mainstream Texas pols and newspapers. The tax remained in place until 1966. Research shows it dampened minority turnout until 1980.

1966: Texas implements a strict new voter registration system. After the Supreme Court invalidated Texas’ poll tax, the state Legislature enacted a restrictive registration system requiring voters to reregister annually during a four-month time period that ended nearly eight months before the general election. The high court ruled the voter registration regime unconstitutional in 1971.

1970: Texas draws discriminatory districts. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the state’s 1970 redistricting lines were intentionally discriminatory. In each redistricting cycle since then, Texas has been found by federal courts to have violated the US Constitution or the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

1971: The state attempts to keep black students from the ballot box. Once 18-year-olds got the right to vote in 1971, Texas’ Waller County became a majority black county. To stave off the wave of new African American votes, county officials fought for years to keep students at the county’s mostly black Prairie View A&M University from accessing the polls.

1981: Texas draws discriminatory districts again. After the state redistricted a decade later, the attorney general found that two of the new districts were discriminatory and violated the Voting Rights Act. (Since 1976, the Justice Department has issued 201 objections to proposed electoral changes in Texas due to the expected discriminatory effects of the measures.)

2003: And again. In a 2006 ruling, the Supreme Court found that one of Texas’ recently redrawn counties violated the VRA.

2011: And again. A year later, a three-judge federal court ruled in Texas v. United States that the state’s local and congressional redistricting maps showed evidence of deliberate discrimination.

2011: Texas enacts its infamous voter ID law. The state’s voter ID law is the harshest of its kind in the country. Poll workers will accept fewer forms of identification than in any other state with a similar law. Earlier this month, a federal trial court struck down the law, ruling that it overly burdened minority voters. The Supreme Court reversed that court’s ruling this past weekend.

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Texas Just Won the Right to Disenfranchise 600,000 People. It’s Not the First Time.

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How One Man Poured Chemicals Into New Jersey’s Drinking Water and Changed Women’s Fashion Forever

by StephanBurrough Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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These days, drinking more water seems to be the solution for everything from weight loss to youthful skin. In fact, we’ve taken our obsession with water so far that the medical community is actually warning people that drinking too much water can be poisonous. What most of us take for granted, however, is that water (in reasonable quantities) is safe to drink—a notion that was absolutely not true a hundred years ago.

The innovations that gave us clean drinking water don’t seem as sexy as self-driving cars or a rover on Mars. But author Steven Johnson argues that these types of technological advances have changed our world in profound ways—impacting everything from life expectancy to women’s fashion (more on that below).

Seemingly mundane scientific breakthroughs can create what Johnson calls a “hummingbird effect,” a reference to the great evolutionary leap that species made when it began to mimic the flight patterns of insects in order to extract nectar more efficiently from flowers. Johnson coined the phrase while writing his latest book—How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World—in Marin County, Calif., where hummingbirds were frequent visitors in his garden. What started out as a distraction provided him with an apt metaphor for the often unpredictable and far-reaching effects that a simple innovation can have on society. “You think you’re inventing something that just involves flowers and insects, but it ends up changing the anatomy of birds,” says Johnson on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “We see that again and again and again in the history of technology.”

So how does Johnson link clean drinking water with female fashion? The story begins with a nineteenth century problem. As American cities grew larger, contamination of drinking water by sewage was becoming a serious health hazard. For John Leal, a doctor based in New Jersey, the problem was personal: his father had died a slow and agonizing death after drinking contaminated water during the Civil War. He wasn’t alone. “Nineteen men in the 144th Regiment died in combat,” writes Johnson, “while 178 died of disease during the war.”

Steven Johnson Nutopia

In addition to his work as a physician, Leal was a health officer and inspector for the city of Paterson, N.J. His duties included understanding and curtailing communicable diseases and disinfecting the homes of people who died from them. He was also in charge of the city’s public water supply and the safe disposal of sewage. This combination of interests and responsibilities ensured that he spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve water safety. Whereas other doctors rejected the notion of using chemicals to kill noxious bacteria in water, Leal began to consider chlorine—in the form of calcium hypochlorite—which was commonly used to disinfect houses and neighborhoods affected by typhoid and cholera outbreaks.

Chloride of lime, as it was called back then, smelled terrible and was known to be toxic, so the idea of putting it in drinking water seemed ludicrous. But Leal realized that in small doses, it was essentially harmless to humans and yet still effective at destroying deadly bacteria. “Leal understood this in part because he had access to very good microscopes,” explains Johnson. “In the old days, if you had a hypothesis about how to clean the water, you would kind of do it, and then you’d wait for a month and see if anybody died.”

But putting what is essentially poison into the city’s water supply was still an unpopular suggestion, to say the least.

And so, a few years later, when Leal was put in charge of Jersey City’s water supply, he added chlorine to the city’s reservoirs “in almost complete secrecy, without any permission from government authorities (and no notice to the general public),” writes Johnson. And not surprisingly, once people realized what he had done, Leal was called a madman and even a terrorist. He had to appear in court to defend his actions, where he testified that he believed his chlorinated water was, in fact, the safest in the world.

The case was settled in his favor and, unlike many of his contemporaries, Leal gave away the recipe for chlorination for free to whomever wanted it. “Unencumbered by patent restrictions and licensing fees,” writes Johnson, “municipalities quickly adopted chlorination as a standard practice, across the United States and eventually the world.”

Mass chlorination had some predictable effects, reducing the mortality rate in the average American city by 43 percent. According to Johnson, parents of infants benefited even more significantly, as the death rate for babies dropped by 74 percent. And while reducing mortality is perhaps the most important consequence of Leal’s innovation, there is also a lighter side to the story.

As the First World War came to an end and chlorination spread across the country, some 10,000 public baths and pools were opened in the United States, giving women a new forum to show off their figures. As pools became safe and swimming became the norm, swimsuit fashions exploded. Or compressed, more accurately. “At the turn of the century,” Johnson writes, “the average woman’s bathing suit required 10 yards of fabric; by the end of the 1930s, one yard was sufficient.”

“Hanging out at a pool and seeing people in swimsuits” became a major driver of fashion, says Johnson. And while Hollywood glamor, fashion magazines, and other cultural changes had an effect, “without the mass adoption of swimming as a leisure activity,” he writes, “those fashions would have been deprived of one of their key showcases.”

How We Got to Now’s publication also coincides with a six-part PBS and BBC television series airing Wednesdays at 10 pm ET, from October 15 to November 12. You can watch a preview below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

Original article:

How One Man Poured Chemicals Into New Jersey’s Drinking Water and Changed Women’s Fashion Forever

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

by TawnyaSherwood Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Catblogging has become harder recently. There’s no shortage of cuteness, obviously, but getting good pictures of the cuteness is tricky. The problem is simple: 55-year-old human reflexes combined with cheap-camera shutter lag are simply no match for 10-month-old kitten reflexes. This produces lots of pictures like the one on the right. You’ll just have to take my word for it, but that’s Hopper carrying around one of her stuffed mice. I’ve muted all the chirping sounds from my camera, which reliably caused them to turn their heads just as the autofocus finally whirred to its proper setting, but even so I have hundreds of photos like this one.

Still, they slow down once in a while, so catblogging isn’t completely lost. On the left, Hopper is behind the drapes trying to chase down an errant bug. On the right, Hilbert is majestically surveying his space.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

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You Thought California’s Drought Couldn’t Get Any Worse? Enter Fracking.

by QBIBiancadiktn Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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I have a great idea. Let’s take one of the globe’s most important agricultural regions, one with severe water constraints and a fast-dropping water table. And let’s set up shop there with a highly water-intensive form of fossil fuel extraction, one that throws off copious amounts of toxic wastewater. Nothing could possibly go wrong … right? Well…

Almost 3 billion gallons of oil industry wastewater have been illegally dumped into central California aquifers that supply drinking water and farming irrigation, according to state documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. The wastewater entered the aquifers through at least nine injection disposal wells used by the oil industry to dispose of waste contaminated with fracking fluids and other pollutants.

The documents also reveal that Central Valley Water Board testing found high levels of arsenic, thallium and nitrates—contaminants sometimes found in oil industry wastewater—in water-supply wells near these waste-disposal operations.

That’s from the Center for Biological Diversity. Hat tip DeSmogBlog.

Original article: 

You Thought California’s Drought Couldn’t Get Any Worse? Enter Fracking.

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