Tag Archives: events

It’s Hard for a White Guy to Get Himself Arrested

by Megan Smith Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at The Atlantic, a former prosecutor named Bobby Constantino has a piece called “I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System.” It’s oddly riveting. It starts with a description of his former career:

In between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed — shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings — I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs. Last year, I got myself arrested in New York City and found out.

In a nutshell, this guy desperately tried to get himself arrested for walking around New York City with a stencil and a spray can (a class B misdemeanor) and had no luck. So he tagged City Hall. With a surveillance camera recording him. Still no luck. He turned himself in. They turned him away. He literally found it impossible to get arrested.

He finally succeeded, spent a night in jail, and went to court. And then just the opposite happened. He was initially sentenced to five days community service until the prosecutor suddenly realized the case file was flagged “no deal.” So he went back to court, and this time they insisted on throwing the book at him. The judge was so pissed off at him that he then doubled the book.

There’s more, and it’s worth a read. A white guy in a suit, it turns out, is practically invulnerable to being arrested. But when he uses this fact to embarrass the judicial system, the judicial system suddenly turns on him with a fury. Welcome to America.

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It’s Hard for a White Guy to Get Himself Arrested

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National Review Lets Its Freak Flag Fly

by Laura Brown Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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National Review is being sued by climate scientist Michael Mann for defamation. In a blog post at The Corner last year, Mark Steyn quoted Rand Simberg calling Mann the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science” (both are from Penn State); wrote that Mann was “the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph”; and concluded that “his ‘investigation’ by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.” (The “investigation” cleared Mann of any wrongdoing.)

A judge recently ruled that Mann’s suit could go forward. I’m personally a little uneasy about this, since I’d normally think of Steyn’s post as hyperbolic and stupid, but still fair comment on a public figure. It’s a close call, though. I suspect Mann will lose his case, but that’s for a jury to decide now.

Today, though, I read this blog post over at NRO asking for money to help them with their defense:

One readers supports NRO with $50 and this note:

I have followed the catastrophic global warming argument since I retired in 2007. In a few years it will be seen as the greatest “scientific” scam of all time. Best wishes on your court case, and glad to help.

….And another reader, sends $200 in support and this:

Have tried in past to support, fully agree with your efforts here. As a chemical engineer, I have been looking at “global warming” for over a decade. Such nonsense.

Questioning climate science is one thing, and National Review has done plenty of that. But I’m still a little surprised that apparently they aren’t embarrassed at having readers who believe that global warming is “the greatest scientific scam of all time.” Or, as the chemical engineer puts it, “nonsense.” In fact, NR is so far from being embarrassed that they put these letters front and center on their website as a call to arms.

Wasn’t there a time when a serious publication would quietly bury correspondence like this? Sure, every magazine has some lunatic readers, but you generally want your public face to be a little more serious. The stuff you publish should at least have the veneer of respectability.

Either that’s hopelessly old-fashioned thinking, or else National Review really does believe that climate change is just flatly a scientific scam. I guess I don’t read them closely enough to know which. But I was still a little taken aback that they seem actively proud to trumpet stuff like this. Shouldn’t they be leaving this kind of thing in Glenn Beck’s capable hands?

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National Review Lets Its Freak Flag Fly

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One of the Films on This Year’s Black List is an Alternate History of Stanley Kubrick Faking the Moon Landing

by VirgilioWjd Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

On Monday, this year’s Black List—the annual list of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood as voted on by over 250 studio executives—was announced via Twitter. This list features 72 titles, six fewer than last year’s. Previous Black Lists have included what would become three of the last five Best Picture Academy Award winners: Argo, The King’s Speech, and Slumdog Millionaire. Being on the list gives your script roughly a 120 percent higher chance of getting made into a feature film by a studio than if it were an average unproduced script.

One of the screenplays inducted onto this year’s Black List (check out the complete list here) is by self-described “newbie” Stephany Folsom, and is intriguingly titled, 1969: A Space Odyssey or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon (an obvious reference to both the title of Stanley Kubrick’s classic black-comedy satire from 1964, and to the director’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968).

Folsom’s 108-page script (a drama) focuses on “Barbara,” a lone wolf working in the publicity department at NASA’s office in Washington, DC, in 1969. The story is an alternate history of how, as the Cold War rages, Barbara reaches out to and convinces acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick to work with NASA to fake the moon and one-up the Soviets.

“Hijinks ensue,” Folsom says.

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One of the Films on This Year’s Black List is an Alternate History of Stanley Kubrick Faking the Moon Landing

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How Bolivia Became Obama’s No. 1 Foreign Policy Screwup of the Year

by sspcc1a Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

What was President Obama’s biggest foreign policy screw-up of the year? There are several worthy contenders, but Dan Drezner nominates Obama’s decision to block the flight home of Bolivian President Evo Morales due to suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden might be on board:

Now, why was this such a big deal? It was a two-fer. First, in going after Snowden so aggressively, the administration put the lie to its claims that Snowden’s revelations weren’t that big of a deal….Second, and more significantly, the desperate and clumsy attempt to grab Snowden dramatically altered the perception by other governments about their preferences.

….When the U.S. forced Morales’ plane to make an emergency landing, [] Washington signaled that it was equally willing to f**k with the sovereignty franchise. At that point, all bets were off for countries predisposed to not helping the United States. Russia kept Snowden, Latin America kept polishing its resentment against the U.S., the rest of the world kept paying attention to Snowden’s revelations, and the United States lost significant hypocritical capabilities.

Would Snowden be in custody today if Obama hadn’t done this? Drezner figures there’s a good chance. I don’t happen to agree, since I have a hard time imagining a scenario in which Russia would be willing to turn over an American spy, but it’s a plausible guess.

In any case, you can lump this together with the fallout from revelations about spying on foreign leaders and bulk collection of overseas data and documents, and it certainly puts the Snowden leaks in the top two foreign policy events of the year for the United States. I’d still put Iran ahead of it if the current talks produce a breakthrough, but that’s it. If the talks fail, or produce only modest progress, then Snowden will be a clear #1.

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How Bolivia Became Obama’s No. 1 Foreign Policy Screwup of the Year

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In Los Angeles Mall, Santas of All Types and Colors

by Delores Crane Posted on December 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports today about Langston Patterson, a black man who’s played Santa at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza since 2004:

Patterson’s place in the Christmas traditions of black families seems only to have increased as the African American population of Los Angeles continues to decline amid waves of Latino immigration. The Crenshaw mall now has both a black Santa and a Spanish-speaking Latino Santa, a nod to the demographic shift. “We make a point to stay in tune with our community,” said Rachel Erickson, the mall’s marketing director.

The Times reports that Patterson is very popular with the local community, which is thrilled that their kids grow up knowing that Santa can be black as well as white. But Patterson is a rarity. A local Santa trainer says he’s had three black pupils out of 2,200 in the past decade.

And the best part of the whole story? It’s just a story. It doesn’t mention Megyn Kelly even in passing.

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In Los Angeles Mall, Santas of All Types and Colors

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Scientists Find That Polluted Oceans Could Make Fish Anxious

by Margherit Posted on December 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared on The Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

We’ve known for a while that the ocean is rapidly becoming too acidic for some forms of marine life to survive. We know that this is caused by continued rising emissions of carbon dioxide, which dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean to form carbonic acid, which in turn dissolves/corrodes calcium carbonate-based coral reefs and shellfish.

Now we also know that ocean acidification does more than break down marine skeletons—it can actually cause behavioral changes in individual organisms. Simply stated, ocean acidification is making fish anxious—or, at least, anxiety as we measure it in fish.

Scientists from UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Canada’s MacEwan University recently published this surprising finding in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science. But what does it mean for fish to be anxious? According to this study, all it takes is observing how much time the fish choose to spend in dark versus light areas of their habitats. The test subjects were juvenile rockfish, whose natural environments—kelp forests—off the California coast offer varying levels of shade and sunlight. The researchers put a control group of rockfish in a tank with “normal,” or unaltered, seawater and observed the fish moving continuously between the light and dark areas of the tank. They put a second group of rockfish in a tank with seawater of elevated acidity, meant to approximate the expected pH of the ocean one hundred years from now, and observed something different.

Previous studies have shown that fish dosed with anxiety-inducing drugs will, instead of moving continuously around their tanks, prefer to dwell in the dark spots. Turns out, putting fish in slightly more acidic water is just like administering an anxiety-inducing drug. “They would go to the dark part of the tank and they wouldn’t move. They just stayed there,” study co-author Martín Tresguerres told the L.A. Times last week.

“If the behavior that we observed in the lab applies to the wild during ocean acidification conditions, it could mean that juvenile rockfish may spend more time in the shaded areas instead of exploring around,” Tresguerres said in a press release last Wednesday. “This would have negative implications due to reduced time foraging for food, or alterations in dispersal behavior, among others.”

Notice that we’re not even talking about shellfish like lobsters or shrimp, who may or may not be experiencing mental anguish in awareness of their threatened bodily integrity. Let it be said, though, that a future study on anxiety in lobsters is not out of the question. “Behavioral neuroscience in fish is a relatively unexplored field, but we do know that fish are capable of many complicated cognitive tasks of learning and memory,” according to Trevor James Hamilton, another of the study’s co-authors.

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Scientists Find That Polluted Oceans Could Make Fish Anxious

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 December 2013

by sssaa Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Gizmodo tells us today that squirrels were first introduced into urban parks by Philadelphia in 1847. Everyone loved it and the idea soon spread:

Central Park led the way in the second wave of squirrels introduced into American cities….Feeding the squirrels became a past time during these years, and was eventually seen by naturalists and conservationists as a way to help humans learn how to better treat animals….So next time you see a squirrel in the park, drink it in. These little critters were put there for your entertainment. But perhaps more importantly, they were put there to remind us of how man and nature must get along, even if it takes a little effort.

The little critters are everywhere now. One in particular has taken up residence in my backyard for some reason. I don’t think there’s anything to eat there, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Is he burying acorns there or something? It would be a pretty good spot, I suppose, since Domino doesn’t go outside much anymore and wouldn’t know what to do with a squirrel if she saw one. Especially in the winter, she much prefers burrowing under a nice, warm quilt. Today’s sample is another double Irish chain design, twin-sized, machine pieced and machine quilted. It nursed me back to health earlier this week when I headed downstairs during a bout of insomnia, so perhaps it has wonderful medicinal qualities too. Who knows?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 December 2013

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M. Night Shyamalan Steps Into the Education Wars

by Nomi Steen Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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This is kind of weird. M. Night Shyamalan has apparently gotten a little bored with making movies, and has instead spent the past year or so writing a book. About education. And unlike other folks who parachute into the ed debates with the usual silver bullets (more charter schools! higher standards! fewer teachers unions!), he actually diagnoses the problem correctly:

You know how everyone says America is behind in education, compared to all the countries? Technically, right now, we’re a little bit behind Poland and a little bit ahead of Liechtenstein, right? So that’s where we land in the list, right? So that’s actually not the truth. The truth is actually bizarrely black and white, literally, which is, if you pulled out the inner-city schools — just pull out the inner-city, low-income schools, just pull that group out of the United States, put them to the side — and just took every other public school in the United States, we lead the world in public-school education by a lot.

And what’s interesting is, we always think about Finland, right? Well, Finland, obviously, is mainly white kids, right? They teach their white kids really well. But guess what, we teach our white kids even better. We beat everyone. Our white kids are getting taught the best public-school education on the planet. Those are the facts.

This is true. If you compare American white kids to, say, Finnish or Polish or German white kids, we do just as well. But we do an execrable job of teaching our black and Hispanic kids. In ed conversations, this usually gets referred to as the “achievement gap”—a deliberately watery term that Shyamalan has no use for. He calls it “education apartheid,” and what it means is that our schools qua schools are basically fine. It’s mostly our inner city schools with big low-income black and Hispanic populations that fail us:

So what are Shyamalan’s solutions? He’s got five:

Get rid of the bottom 2-3 percent of truly terrible teachers.
Make the principal the chief academic and head coach. Let another person handle school operations.
Constant feedback to teachers and students.
Small schools (not small classes).
Increased instructional time. Extend the school day and do away with summer vacation.

I don’t want to pretend that Shyamalan has all the answers here, or that his five interventions are themselves silver bullets. But I’ll say this: based on my sense of the literature and the endless number of n-point plans I’ve read over the years, Shyamalan’s sounds pretty reasonable. At the very least, his book is a welcome addition to the debate.

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M. Night Shyamalan Steps Into the Education Wars

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How Tallahassee Police Blew the Jameis Winston Case

by CaridadSleeman Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, prosecutors in Tallahassee announced they would not press charges against Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston, over allegations he had raped a former FSU student in December of 2012. Investigators had sat on the case for almost a year, and an attorney for the accuser (who withdrew from school after coming forward) alleged that Tallahassee police had told her to tread carefully, because she was in a “big football town.” The press conference announcing that no charges would be filed was interrupted frequently by laughter from the (mostly male) attendees.

On Friday, the Tampa Bay Times broke down just how lax the Tallahassee Police Department’s investigation really was. After interviewing the accuser in January of 2013, police were presented with a number of obvious sources to follow up with: they knew the bar where she’d been drinking; they knew she’d taken a taxi; and they knew that a football player named “Chris” had walked in on the alleged rape. Among the details:

“More than 200 pages of documents showed no signs that police ever questioned anyone at the bar or requested surveillance footage. The bar had more than 30 cameras that could have shown how much the woman drank, if she interacted with Winston and whom she left with.”
“Police also seemed to quickly give up on finding the cab or its driver, though a specific company (Yellow Cab) was known to offer student discounts.”

“Back then, police also didn’t look for the freshman football player named Chris. A simple review of the Seminoles’ 2012 roster shows Chris Casher was the only true freshman on the team with that first name. Investigators later learned that Casher was Winston’s roommate and had walked in on the sexual activity—in part to record it on his cellphone. By the time investigators interviewed Casher in November, the recording had been deleted and the phone discarded.”

That last item may be the most damning—there was literally a video of the alleged crime and police never tried to find it.

That’s not to say Winston would have been found guilty. Maybe the leads investigators never followed might have led them to the same conclusion they ultimately drew. But the nature of the investigation made it clear that the odds were stacked against the accuser from the start. It would hardly be the first time.

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How Tallahassee Police Blew the Jameis Winston Case

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Bill Moyers: "That Sound You Hear Is the Shredding of the Social Contract"

by 0xo4cdr4 Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and—in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular—the defense of a free press.

Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”

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Bill Moyers: "That Sound You Hear Is the Shredding of the Social Contract"

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