Tag Archives: europe

Rumor of the Day: Gay Marriage Martyr Kim Davis Met With the Pope Last Week

by LayneI91ysavpze Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s your spine-tingling rumor of the day, straight from Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican. He claims that gay marriage martyr Kim Davis met with Pope Francis last Thursday at the Vatican embassy in Washington DC, just before he left for New York City:

“The Pope spoke in English,” she told me. “There was no interpreter. ‘Thank you for your courage,’ Pope Francis said to me. I said, ‘Thank you, Holy Father.’ I had asked a monsignor earlier what was the proper way to greet the Pope, and whether it would be appropriate for me to embrace him, and I had been told it would be okay to hug him. So I hugged him, and he hugged me back. It was an extraordinary moment. ‘Stay strong,’ he said to me. Then he gave me a rosary as a gift, and he gave one also to my husband, Joe. I broke into tears. I was deeply moved.”

….Vatican sources have confirmed to me that this meeting did occur; the occurrence of this meeting is not in doubt.

Davis’s lawyers also say the meeting took place, and told WDRB News that although they don’t have photos of the meeting yet, they’ll release them as soon as they get them. Davis herself, though, is silent about all this—which seems a little odd since she hasn’t been shy about talking to the media before. So far there’s neither confirmation nor denial from the Vatican.

Did this actually happen, or is it a truly bizarre hoax? I cannot tell you. But I figured you’d want to know.

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Rumor of the Day: Gay Marriage Martyr Kim Davis Met With the Pope Last Week

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House Benghazi Committee Breaks Record — Sort Of

by TaniaRizzo Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today’s news:

The House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks is now the longest congressional investigation in history, committee Democrats announced today. As of Monday, the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has been active for 72 weeks — surpassing the record previously held by the Watergate Committee in the 1970’s.

I suppose this is technically correct. But let’s gaze through a broader lens and take a look at the Whitewater investigation:

The House Banking Committee began hearings in March 1994, and they petered out in early 1995. Call it 50 weeks or so.
The Senate Whitewater Committee began in May 1995 and issued its final report in June 1996. That’s 57 weeks.
But wait! The Senate investigation was a continuation of the Senate Banking Committee investigation, which began in July 1994. If you count this as one big Senate investigation, as you really should, it lasted 98 weeks.
But wait again! The Whitewater investigation really started on January 20, 1994, when special counsel Robert Fiske was appointed. It ended on September 20, 2000, when Fiske’s successor, Robert Ray, announced there was “insufficient evidence” to show that the Clintons had done anything wrong. That’s 348 weeks.

So sure: in terms of a single congressional committee in continuous existence, Benghazi is now the all-time record holder. But in terms of how long a political investigation has lasted through all its permutations, I’d guess that 348 weeks is unlikely to be beaten anytime soon. When it comes to political witch hunts, Whitewater was—and remains—the king of fruitless idiocy.

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House Benghazi Committee Breaks Record — Sort Of

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It’s Really Hard Not to Hate the Pharmaceutical Industry

by AngieKerns Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Another day, another drug. Today comes news of Nitropress, a generic blood pressure drug that was priced at $44 per vial way back in 2013. Then it was sold to Marathon Pharmaceuticals, which raised the price to $257. A few months ago it was sold yet again, this time to Valeant Pharmaceuticals, which raised the price to $806. But no worries! According to a spokesman, no one will ever be denied this medication:

“These are drugs that are only used by hospitals — they are not sold in pharmacies — in accordance with specific surgical procedures. This means that whenever the protocol calls for use of these drugs, they are used. Patients are never denied these drugs when the protocols call for their use.”

And there you have it. Hospitals have to use it, and no one else makes it, so Valeant can charge whatever they want. Satisfied?

Anyway, Democrats are “demanding answers” from Valeant, which will probably do about as much good as it did when they demanded answers from Marathon last year about their price increase. Or all the other companies they’ve demanded answers from ever since 10x price increases became the pharmaceutical industry’s favorite new sport. That is to say, none.

It’s a funny thing. I’ve probably read just about every reason in the book explaining why national health care is supposed to be a terrible idea. Most of these reasons are pretty lousy—either unsupported by the evidence or else directly contradicted by it. But there’s one exception: the argument that a national health care plan would drive down the price of drugs—as it has everywhere else in the world—and this would stifle innovation in the pharmaceutical biz. There’s some real merit to this claim.

It’s not quite that simple, of course, and it would take a longish post to go through this topic in detail. Nonetheless, you can put me in the camp of those who want to tread pretty carefully when it comes to regulating pharmaceutical pricing. But these guys are sure making it hard to maintain that position, aren’t they?

Original source – 

It’s Really Hard Not to Hate the Pharmaceutical Industry

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Yet Another Look at How Our Kids Are Really Doing in School

by MabelSloman Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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So how are our kids doing? I mean, really doing? In particular, how are our black high-school kids doing at math?

A few days ago I showed the results for the Long-Term NAEP math test. This is a version of the NAEP that’s stayed fairly similar over the years so that it’s possible to see long-term trends. But Bob Somerby isn’t buying it. Why not look at the Main NAEP instead, since that’s the standard version of the NAEP that usually gets all the headline?

There are two reasons. First, the Main NAEP starts in 1990, so if you want to see longer-term trends, it’s useless. More to the point, it’s not even that useful for medium-term trends because there was a major break in 2005: the test changed and the scale changed, from a 500-point scale to a 300-point scale. So what happened between 2000 and 2005? No one knows. There are no official comparisons.

Still, you can do this: look at the change from 1990-2000 and the change from 2005-2013. That should give you a reasonable idea of what’s happened over the past 25 years. When Somerby does this, he gets 6.11 + 5.24 = +11.34 points. That’s a pretty good gain. By contrast, when you look at the Long-Term NAEP scores over that same period, you get a drop of -1 points. That’s a huge difference. What’s going on?

Let’s take a crack at figuring this out. The long-term scores are easy: neither the test nor the scale have changed, so you just look at the numbers and multiply all of them by 3/5 to norm them to a 300-point scale. For the main test, we need to norm the 1990-2000 scores to a 300-point scale and then paste them together with the 2005-2013 scores. The chart on the right shows what you get.

On the long-term test, scores are still down by about 1 point. Nothing much has changed. But on the main test, scores are up by only 1 point instead of 11 points. What happened? Two things:

The 6-point increase from 1990-2000 becomes a 3.6-point increase when you renorm it to a 300-point scale.
There’s an unrecorded drop of 7.4 points between 2000 and 2005.

Altogether, this shaves about 10 points from the raw 11-point gain. If that’s accurate, it means there’s no mystery. One test is up by a point and the other is down by a point. Since these tests have a margin of error of about one point, that’s close enough to identical not to worry about.

Needless to say, this leaves us with some questions. Is it acceptable to casually renorm scores by simple multiplication? Is the drop between 2000 and 2005 real? Or is it because the test got harder? Why do scores on the main test bounce around considerably while scores on the long-term test stay pretty stable? There hardly seems to be any correlation between scores on the two tests at all.

Almost certainly, experts would be aghast at all this renorming and extrapolation. But I think it gets us closer to the truth. And one way or another, you have to account for that 2000-05 gap. If you ignore it, you’re ignoring what could be a substantial part of the story.

In any case, this is why I think you’re better off looking at the long-term test if you want to see long-term trends. That’s what it’s designed for, and you don’t have to monkey with the data. Either way, though, we end up with pretty much the same story: black test scores (and white scores and Hispanic scores) have been pretty stagnant since 1990 for high school seniors. This doesn’t mean the gains in earlier grades are nothing to celebrate. They are, and reporters should pay more attention to them. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter what the score is in the sixth inning if your bullpen consistently blows big leads. What we care about is how well educated our kids are when they leave school and enter the world. Until our high schools are able to build on the big gains they’re inheriting from middle schools, we’re not going to see any improvement on that score.

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to look at the raw data yourself, there are plenty of ways to do it. However, the following printed reports provide easy access to all of it:

Main NAEP, 1990-2000
Main NAEP, 2005-2013
Long-Term NAEP
Standard errors

For what it’s worth, two more notes. First, the main test is given to 12th graders. The long-term test is given to 17-year-olds, who are both 11th and 12th graders. Also: since 2000, the two tests have been given a year apart. Neither of these is likely to affect scores or trends in any material way.

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Yet Another Look at How Our Kids Are Really Doing in School

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VW Tries to Blame Engine Emissions Fraud on Low-Level "Engineers and Technicians"

by GiuseppBurgett Posted on September 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess it was just a few bad apples. That’s a relief:

Volkswagen has blamed its emissions scandal on a “small group” of people and has suspended a number of staff as Matthias Müller was unveiled as its new chief executive.

….Berthold Huber, the acting head of VW’s supervisory board, called the crisis a “moral and policy disaster”….“The test manipulations are a moral and political disaster for Volkswagen. The unlawful behaviour of engineers and technicians involved in engine development shocked Volkswagen just as much as it shocked the public.”

This is ridiculous. What incentive do low-level engineers and technicians have to do this on their own? Hell, they couldn’t even take on a project like this unless their managers OKed the time to do it, and their managers wouldn’t do it unless they were being pressed by higher-ups. Anybody who’s ever worked at a big corporation knows this perfectly well. And according to Bloomberg, that’s exactly what happened:

Volkswagen AG executives in Germany controlled the key aspects of emissions tests whose results the carmaker now admits were faked, according to three people familiar with the company’s U.S. operations.

….Their accounts show the chain of command and those involved in the deception stretched to Volkswagen headquarters…. Ulrich Hackenberg…. Wolfgang Hatz are among those who will leave the company in the wake of Winterkorn’s resignation two days ago, two people familiar with the matter said. The two previously ran units at the heart of the affair — Hackenberg, a Winterkorn confidant, was responsible for VW brand development from 2007 to 2013, while Hatz ran the group’s motor development from 2007 to 2011.

Will it go even higher? Stay tuned. However, I’ll call BS on UBS, which apparently thinks this scandal “could signal the eventual end of the combustion engine.” Please. There’s no difficulty “amassing accurate data” on engine emissions, as one of their analysts suggests. VW amassed very precise data. They just chose to hide it by means of a calculated, premeditated, multi-year fraud. Anyone who hasn’t done the same should be in fine shape.

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VW Tries to Blame Engine Emissions Fraud on Low-Level "Engineers and Technicians"

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Forget Germany. Refugees in Croatia First Have to Figure Out Where the Hell They Are.

by JaredVfirixnsir Posted on September 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Information has been a lifeline for refugees on the route into Europe, with many of them trading updates and tips via WhatsApp while moving from country to country. But in Croatia this week, the information seemed to dry up.

“Where are we?” asked Mohammed, an elderly man from the Syrian city of Aleppo. He and three other men had just stepped off a bus in a cornfield near Šid, a town in northeastern Serbia, after a quick and confusing trip from Greece. They were a 15-minute walk from Croatia, the next step on their trip, but none of them had any clue what country they were in.

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Forget Germany. Refugees in Croatia First Have to Figure Out Where the Hell They Are.

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New Hillary Clinton Emails Surface

by RobertaRosenbau Posted on September 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Uh oh:

The Obama administration has discovered a chain of emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of work-related correspondence as secretary of state, officials said Friday, adding to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner’s unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.

This is the kind of thing that really could hurt Hillary Clinton. But when you scroll down to the details, it looks a lot less sinister:

The messages were exchanged with retired Gen. David Petraeus….They largely pertained to personnel matters and don’t appear to deal with highly classified material, officials said.

….The State Department’s record of Clinton emails begins on March 18, 2009 — almost two months after she entered office. Before then, Clinton has said she used an old AT&T Blackberry email account, the contents of which she no longer can access. The Petraeus emails…start on Jan. 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older email account. But by Jan. 28 — a week after her swearing in — she switched to using the private email address on a homebrew server that she would rely on for the rest of her tenure. There are less than 10 emails back and forth in total, officials said, and the chain ends on Feb. 1.

In other words, we’re missing the very tag end of an innocuous email chain from Hillary’s Senate days that spilled over into her tenure as Secretary of State. That’s a little hard to get too exercised about.

I don’t know what the broader picture is here. Clinton has consistently said she switched to her new email address on March 18, but the Petraeus emails make it look like she might have switched by January 28. Or maybe she partially switched? Or else emails started getting forwarded to the new account as a test for a few weeks, and then got deleted on March 18 when she began using it for good? Beats me.

Either way, this seems typical of this whole affair. Substantively, it’s hard to believe anything shady is going on here. After all, it’s unlikely there’s anything to hide from her first few weeks in office, and certainly not the Petraeus emails. But optically, it certainly looks bad. It seems like another example of Clinton handling her email issue awkwardly and defensively when she doesn’t really need to.

On the bright side for Hillary, this news was released on a day when the media was preoccupied with popemania and John Boehner’s resignation. So at least she’s not getting another round of dismal front-page headlines out of it. Yet.

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New Hillary Clinton Emails Surface

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Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

by KendallTrego824 Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis says that economist Deirdre McCloskey has written “the most powerful defense of market capitalism you will ever read.” It’s based on the chart on the right, which shows the fantastic growth of the world economy since about 1800:

Now, McCloskey does not like the word “capitalism.” She would prefer our economic system be called “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved.”

Or perhaps “fantastically successful liberalism, in the old European sense, applied to trade and politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting and literature.”

Or simply “trade-tested progress.”

I am a considerable fan of capitalism by nearly any standard (aside from the current Republican Party one, which essentially holds that you’re a socialist if you believe in any regulation of large corporations at all). So sure: capitalism or free market exchange or whatever you want to call it certainly deserves plenty of credit here.

But was it the main driving force of the post-1800 economy? McCloskey says the Great Expansion wasn’t the result of “coal, thrift, transport, high male wages, low female and child wages, surplus value, human capital, geography, railways, institutions, infrastructure, nationalism, the quickening of commerce, the late medieval run-up, Renaissance individualism, the First Divergence, the Black Death, American silver, the original accumulation of capital, piracy, empire, eugenic improvement, the mathematization of celestial mechanics, technical education, or a perfection of property rights.” Those had existed for a long time. Rather, it’s the fact that European elites “came to accept or even admire the values of trade and betterment.”

But does that seem right? I don’t know much about China or India—and I might be wrong about Europe too—but I’ve always thought that trade and commerce were also relatively free during, say, the height of the Roman Empire. The landed elites made a lot of money in trade, and if merchants weren’t quite pillars of society, they were hardly social lepers either. The legions were routinely used to protect trade routes. Corruption was endemic, but tariffs and regulations on trade were fairly mild. The pursuit of wealth was respectable, and accounting practices were sophisticated.

Is that right? Maybe I’m woefully misinformed. But it seems like the big difference between AD 0 and AD 1800 wasn’t so much attitudes toward trade as it was the obvious thing that McCloskey left off her list: machines. As long as humans and animals were the only source of power, there was a limit to how much wealth could be generated. But if the Romans had invented steam engines and electrification, we’d all be speaking Latin today and arguing about what made Roman culture so special.

This is something that’s been a subject of academic study for a long time, and I hardly expect to break any new ground here. But while a respect for fairly free trade might be a prerequisite for exponential economic growth, the example of Rome suggests that more than that is needed. The truly interesting question, then, is: why did 18th century Europeans invent machine power but 1st century Europeans didn’t?

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Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

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All of Our Negotiating Partners Think the Iran Deal Is Just Fine

by MargheritaHeine Posted on August 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports that the Iran deal is just a big yawn in Europe:

The matter is settled, according to Camille Grand, director of the Strategic Research Foundation in Paris and an expert on nuclear nonproliferation. “In Europe, you don’t have a constituency against the deal,” he said. “In France, I can’t think of a single politician or member of the expert community who has spoken against it, including some of us who were critical during the negotiations.”

Mr. Grand said the final agreement was better than he had expected. “I was surprised by the depth and the quality of the deal,” he said. “The hawks are satisfied, and the doves don’t have an argument.”

No arguments? I got your arguments right here. 24 days! Self-inspections! $150 billion! Death to America! Neville Chamberlain!

If the Europeans have no arguments against the deal, they aren’t even trying. They should try calling the Republican Party for a set of serious, detailed, and principled talking points.

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All of Our Negotiating Partners Think the Iran Deal Is Just Fine

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No, the Earth Is Not Heading for a “Mini Ice Age”

by EdithHXAZzf Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new study and related press release from the Royal Astronomical Society is making the rounds in recent days, claiming that a new statistical analysis of sunspot cycles shows “solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s” to a level that last occurred during the so-called Little Ice Age, which ended 300 years ago.

Since climate change deniers have a particular fascination with sunspot cycles, this story has predictably been picked up by all manner of conservative news media, with a post in the Telegraph quickly gathering up tens of thousands of shares. The only problem is, it’s a wildly inaccurate reading of the research.

Sunspots have been observed on a regular basis for at least 400 years, and over that period, there’s a weak correlation between the number of sunspots and global temperature—most notably during a drastic downturn in the number of sunspots from about 1645 to 1715. Known as the Maunder minimum, this phenomenon happened about the same time as a decades-long European cold snap known as the Little Ice Age. That connection led to theory that this variability remains the dominant factor in Earth’s climate. Though that idea is still widely circulated, it’s been disproved. In reality, sunspots fluctuate in an 11-year cycle, and the current cycle is the weakest in 100 years—yet 2014 was the planet’s hottest year in recorded history.

If you look closely at the original press release, the study’s author, Valentina Zharkova, never implied a new ice age is imminent—only that we may see a sharp downturn in the number of sunspots. Yes, the sun is a variable star, but its output is remarkably stable. The amount of energy we receive from the sun just doesn’t change fast enough to cause a rapid-onset ice age in just a few decades.

The root of the problem here may be a poorly worded quote in the press release implying an imminent 60 percent decline in solar activity. Yes, numbers of sunspots can vary by that much or even more on an 11-year cycle, but the sun’s output—the total amount of energy we get—is extremely stable and only changes by about 0.1 percent, even in extreme sunspot cycles like the one Zharkova is predicting.

But let’s play devil’s advocate: What if Zharkova is right about the decline in solar activity? There’s still no need to worry (or to become complacent about global warming). Even assuming sunspots are in the process of shutting down, as happened during the Maunder minimum and Little Ice Age, it wouldn’t matter much.

An interesting new study published in June showed that a sharp decline in solar activity to record lows could have a relatively large impact on regional climate over a period of decades. But even the return of a Maunder minimum type slowdown in solar activity—an extreme scenario, by any measure—would slow global warming by only about a half-degree in northern Europe. That’s essentially negligible, on a global scale. A half-degree is within the margin of error of predictions for the continued decline in frost-free days in the United Kingdom, for example. Winter will still be a month shorter, on average, by the end of the century. Past research suggests that an extreme decline in solar activity would lead to a shift of just 0.16 degrees Celsius globally—and even that is erased once a more typical solar cycle resumes in a few decades.

For reference, we’ve already warmed the planet by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880 thanks to fossil fuels, and, despite all our decades of discussion about the problem, we’re still on pace for a worst-case scenario of between 3 and 4 degrees of warming by century end.

If anything, changes in the oceans—especially the Pacific, our largest ocean—over the last couple of years point to an imminent increase in the rate of global warming. El Niño has already grown to record levels in the Pacific for this time of year, and ocean temperatures in the vast patch of sea from Hawaii to California to Alaska are also without precedent. Similar events have coincided with a 10- to 20-year surge in global temperatures.

No matter what the sun does over the next century, we are not heading in to a new ice age. Why am I so sure about that? It may have something to do with the 110 million tons of carbon dioxide humanity is pumping into the atmosphere every single day. The resulting change to our global climate system is so huge, it overwhelms all natural atmospheric forces, including the sun. There is no other plausible explanation for global warming except us.

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No, the Earth Is Not Heading for a “Mini Ice Age”

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