Tag Archives: events

Your Weekend PSA: Using Date Ranges in Google Search

by Poppy Hill Posted on February 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is a public service announcement about a feature of Google search that few people seem to know about: date ranges. This is useful in a couple of ways. First, I sometimes want only pages that are really recent, and it’s handy to be able to restrict results to the past hour or the past day. Alternatively, sometimes I’m looking for something old, which is hard to find because Google heavily prioritizes recent results. A specific date range fixes that.

In any case, it’s easy to specify a date range. After your results come up, click Search tools at the top of the page. Then click Any time and choose an option from the dropdown list. That’s it.

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Your Weekend PSA: Using Date Ranges in Google Search

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Only Obama Can Block the Keystone Pipeline Now

by BrentonHoutz Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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The decision on whether or not to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport crude oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, has always been President Obama’s to make. But the environmental stakes are so high—leading climate scientist James Hansen is fond of referring to the pipeline as “game over for the climate” because it would promote the extraction of one of the dirtiest kinds of oil—that a decision has been delayed for the last few years as the State Department carries out a review of the project’s likely environmental impact.

That wait ended today, as State released its Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. The report says the annual carbon emissions from producing, refining, and burning the oil the pipeline would move (830,000 barrels per day) would add up to 147-168 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. (By contrast, the typical coal-fired power plant produces 3.5 million metric tons of CO2 annually.) That sounds like a lot, but the report comes with an important caveat:

Approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands or the demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States.

In other words, according to the report, those emissions are likely to happen whether the president approves Keystone XL or not. That’s an important distinction, given that President Obama has already said that in order to gain approval, the pipeline must not increase carbon emissions. But there are other ways to move oil: For example, the report mentions that “rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if pipelines are delayed or not constructed.” Rail transit is already underway; yesterday an ExxonMobil exec said the company had begun to use trains to pack oil out of the tar sands (despite their pretty awful safety record). But if the oil is going to be extracted (and the emissions emitted) one way or another, the case for blocking the pipeline per se becomes less clear.

There’s still one more important document yet to be released by State: an investigation by the department’s internal Inspector General into a potential conflict of interest by a contractor who helped produce the report, Environmental Resources Management. As Mother Jones first reported, State Department officials took steps to conceal that some ERM employees had ties to companies that would profit from the pipeline’s construction. Last December, Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz) led a coalition of House members who asked the president to delay release of the environmental impact statement until after the Inspector General’s report is released, which is not expected for several more weeks.

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Only Obama Can Block the Keystone Pipeline Now

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Chart of the Day: Everyone Agrees That Iraq Was a Disaster

by JosephFinsch Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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A new Pew poll shows that there’s no longer any difference between Democrats and Republicans on Iraq: huge majorities agree that the war was a failure.

What’s interesting is the inflection point in 2008: Democrats became suddenly more optimistic about Iraq and Republicans became more pessimistic. This was before Barack Obama won the election, so it’s not directly because of that. But by mid-2008, negotiations over withdrawal had stalled and it was clear that the end of the US troop presence was near. It was also increasingly clear that Obama was likely to win the presidency. Those two things combined might account for the partisan differences.

By 2012, with US troops gone, those partisan differences started to disappear. By 2014, they were gone. Hardly anyone could fool themselves into thinking that the Iraq War had succeeded in any way: there were no WMDs; there wasn’t much oil flowing; Iran’s influence had increased; and sectarian violence was once more on the rise. A third of the country can still be described as dead-enders on this score, but that’s it. Everyone else has finally faced the facts.

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Chart of the Day: Everyone Agrees That Iraq Was a Disaster

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Here’s Yet Another Obamacare Non-Horror Story

by ConnorWattersto Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here in California, we keep feeling the hammer blows of Obamacare. Thanks to the new law, our state’s largest individual health insurer is being forced to jack up insurance premiums for thousands of — oh wait. Let’s read the fine print here:

Thousands of Anthem Blue Cross individual customers with older insurance policies untouched by Obamacare are getting some jarring news: Their premiums are going up as much as 25%….Anthem Blue Cross said its plan to raise rates reflects that escalating healthcare costs are an economic reality industrywide.

The company said customers do have new options thanks to the healthcare law. “Many of the members affected here may be eligible for federal subsidies via the Covered California exchange and may have lower premiums if they decide to switch to an Affordable Care Act-compliant policy,” company spokesman Darrel Ng said.

Roger that. Premiums are skyrocketing for policies that have nothing to do with Obamacare. What’s more, Anthem Blue Cross is recommending that affected customers might want to check out the Obamacare exchange to see if they can get a better deal there.

This is yet another reason to be skeptical of claims that Obamacare is responsible for rate shock all over the country. It’s not a myth. It really has happened to some people. But the truth is that it affects only a small number of people; the horror story anecdotes routinely turn out to be either exaggerated or flatly false; and insurance companies have been jacking up rates for years anyway. They were going to do it in 2014 whether Obamacare existed or not.

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Here’s Yet Another Obamacare Non-Horror Story

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

by JuliaPage Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last election season, a shadowy nonprofit pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign to change how electoral votes are counted. The group didn’t disclose who was funding its efforts—a fact that Mother Jones highlighted in a story titled “Who’s Paying for the GOP’s Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election?” But now, thanks to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan government watchdog, it’s clear that organizations with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch footed at least some of the bill.

Each state and the District of Columbia has a certain number of electoral votes, based on their population, and they get to decide for themselves how those votes should be allotted. Currently, every state except Maine and Nebraska gives all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. But in 2011, GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin introduced bills that would divide electoral votes among candidates based on how many congressional districts they won. Because Republicans drew the boundaries of the districts in those states, this scheme would be almost certain to hand Republican presidential candidates the majority of their electoral votes—even if more voters cast ballots for Democrats. (Read more about how the plan would work here.) Presuming the race is close enough, this could decide the nationwide outcome.

In the case of Pennsylvania, a mysterious nonprofit called All Votes Matter spent large sums lobbying for these changes. Local officials wondered about its funding sources. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days,” Democratic Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach told Mother Jones at the time. “We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.” But All Votes Matter didn’t disclose its donors, nor did it have to. The group is organized as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit, which means that it can spend money on politics while keeping its donors secret. (Such groups are not supposed to spend more than half of their budget on political causes, but IRS enforcement is slack.) Thus the public knew little about the agendas behind this effort to upend the mechanics of presidential elections.

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

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The New Farm Bill: Yet Again, Not Ready for Climate Change

by DeannaColleano Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Imagine you’re a policy maker in a large country in an era of increasing climate instability—more floods and droughts, driven by steadily increasing average temperatures. And say the policy you make largely dictated the way your country’s farmers grow their crops. Wouldn’t you push for a robust, climate change-ready agriculture—one that stores carbon in the soil, helping stabilize the climate while also making farms more resilient to weather extremes?

There’s no real mystery about how to achieve these goals. I profiled a farmer last year named David Brandt who’s doing just that with a few highly imitable techniques (spoiler: crop rotation and cover crops), right in the middle of Big Corn country. This peer-reviewed 2012 Iowa State University study tells a similar tale. The question is, how to turn farmers like Brandt from outliers into to trendsetters—from the exception to the rule. The obvious lever would be the farm bill, that twice-a-decade omnibus legislation that shapes the decisions of millions of farmers nationwide, while also funding our major food-aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be called food stamps.

Well, after more than a year of heated debate, Congress has finally cobbled together a new farm bill, one likely to be signed into law soon by President Obama. Unfortunately, the great bulk of that debate didn’t focus how to steer the country’s agriculture through the trying times ahead. Instead, it concerned how much to cut food aid for poor people. The Democrats wanted relatively minor cuts; the Republicans, animated by the tea party wing, wanted draconian ones. The (relatively) good news: the new bill will cut SNAP by $9 billion over the next decade, vs. the $40 billion demanded by austerity-obsessed GOP backbenchers. My colleague Erika Eichelberger has more on this sad business of pinching food aid at a time of record poverty.

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The New Farm Bill: Yet Again, Not Ready for Climate Change

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MythBusters’ Kari Byron Explains How to Safely Blow Stuff Up When You’re Pregnant

by WillardDulhunty Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Most expecting women ask their doctors whether it’s okay to eat blue cheese, or have the odd glass of wine, while they’re pregnant. Or maybe whether to stay away from fish, because of the mercury. When she was pregnant with her daughter several years ago, though, MythBusters’ Kari Byron took her maternal Q & A to a whole different level.

“I’d be going to my doctor saying, ‘All right, so, when do I have to stop shooting guns because she has ears?'” recalls Byron on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “And the doctor would say, ‘Hmm, I have never, ever had that question before. I’ll get back to you.’ I come back a little later: ‘How far away do I need to be from an explosion of this much C-4?’ ‘Huh, I’ve never had that question asked. I have no idea, I don’t even know where to refer you right now, I’ll get back to you.'”

As a co-host of arguably the most successful science-based show on television, Byron has developed a reputation as a courageous and fun-loving guide to testing the truth behind so many ideas that we take for granted. Airing on the Discovery Channel since 2003, MythBusters seeks to either validate or bust myths, rumors and folk wisdom—and has managed to find that sweet spot where curiosity meets creativity, and plenty of stuff gets blown up. (The show boasts of over 750 detonations, “and counting.”) “The whole idea behind the show is that we’re not scientists,” says Byron. “It’s not a talking head telling you facts, it’s watching regular Joes experience the problem. And it just happens to be that the best way to explore myth is the scientific method, it’s the perfect narrative.”

In this mix, Byron has a special place: She’s the only female MythBusters co-host in a field, science entertainment, where women are all too often relegated to bit parts. Insofar as MythBusters is one of the few shows on television that increase rather than diminish our intelligence, Byron’s presence as a high-profile female role model promoting critical thinking and making science accessible is vitally important.

The MythBusters gang at the 2010 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. Michael Germana/Globe Photos/ZUMA

She didn’t start out there: Byron originally wanted to make a living as a sculptor, but found herself working instead as a receptionist at an ad agency. “I was trying to figure out a way to be artistic, but still not be starving, because nobody was actually buying my sculptures,” she laughs. “They were a little dark.” That’s when a tour of MythBusters host Jamie Hyneman’s special effects workshop, M5 Industries, introduced her to a very different use of artistic materials. She begged for an internship and got it. “Not long after, they just pulled me onto the show,” she remembers.

Nowadays Byron is part of the MythBusters’ “Build Team,” a trio that includes herself, model-builder Tory Belleci, and electronics expert Grant Imahara. The Build Team often works separately from the original hosts, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Here’s a video of Byron and Imahara demonstrating just how loud the show’s detonations can be:

And here’s Byron on a recent myth test. The goal was to determine whether or not humans can outrun a horde of zombies. More specifically, how many zombies must there be in a given area (here, the size of a football field) before a human can no longer elude them, assuming the zombies can only move at about 2 miles per hour? Watch:

Asked about her favorite myths (either busted or proved true), Byron remembers one particularly scary one: Diving with sharks, with and without lights, to try to see if the sharks were drawn to flashlights (as many divers report). “And yes, they were attracted to flashlights,” Byron says. Maybe too much so: The team had to get out of the water on the flashlight dive for safety reasons.

A more recent episode, meanwhile, involved testing out strategies for deterring unwanted animals: from kittens, to snakes, to grizzly bears. When it comes to bears, it turns out cayenne pepper worked great. “The bear didn’t like that at all,” says Byron, “it was sneezing all over the place.” Later, Byron put the bear mace on her keychain for safety, and had it with her on a camping trip with her sister and brother-in-law. “And at one point,” she says, “I had gone to take a nap in the tent with my baby, and I hear my brother in law sort of freaking out. He’s like, ‘Wait, is this, this sunscreen on this keychain, this red stuff, it’s starting to burn!’ He had sprayed it all over his arms and rubbed it in, not realizing it was bear mace pepper spray. And he started running around, screaming, looking for things to pour on it. So, it also works on brother-in-laws.”

Here’s an aftershow of Byron and her co-hosts discussing what they found out about animal-repelling strategies:

Of course, Byron is also interested in—or, worried about—some more socially consequential myths. As a mom, she’s particularly appalled by the myth that vaccines cause autism. “It really frustrates me that things like this get propagated, this sort of pseudoscience, and still to this day get propagated,” she says.

Which gets back to why MythBusters isn’t just about running from zombies or swimming with sharks: It’s about a style of thinking, and a celebration of what we can do with our brains once we set up some reliable guidelines for using them. What’s more, if you combine together critical thinking lessons with actual mass entertainment in the way that MythBusters does, then you start to actually make a difference. The public response that Byron receives demonstrates just that.

“I’ve met so many mothers who were telling me that their girl was interested because I was on the show,” says Byron. “And that really touched me, because when I was 12 years old, I kind of stopped being interested in science. It wasn’t something that could compete with boys and rock stars and MTV. You didn’t have role models. Even on TV, the doctors were all men.”

So now, with MythBusters, with her recent show Head Rush on the Science Channel, and with future projects, Byron says her goal is to “find that 12 year old girl that I was, and keep her interested in science.”

What she can’t do, though, is guess ahead of time, without any investigation, which myths are true and which aren’t. “People think that I just have like the Webster’s of all myth knowledge,” she says.

“And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I’d have to test that.'”

To listen to the full interview with Kari Byron you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a report by Mother Jones’ Brett Brownell on our growing ability to detect extra-solar planets, and a discussion of, yes, the myth that antioxidant vitamins protect against cancer.

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

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MythBusters’ Kari Byron Explains How to Safely Blow Stuff Up When You’re Pregnant

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Conservatives Don’t Want You To Eat Pro-Abortion Girl Scout Cookies

by MargartDunaway Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s time for the annual Girl Scout cookie freak out! This year, it’s not due to the palm oil used to produce the treats, nor the group’s policy on transgender members: This time, Girl Scouts are supposedly too pro-abortion.

As Think Progress reports, in December, Girl Scouts tweeted a link to a Huffington Post story extolling Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (of anti-abortion bill filibuster fame) as a candidate for “Woman of the Year.”

And in a Facebook post, the organization linked to a Washington Post list of “Seven American Women Who Made a Difference in 2013,” including US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. These links were enough to spur John Pisciotta, who runs Pro-Life Waco, to launch a national boycott. “The Girl Scouts were once a truly amazing organization, but it has been taken over by idealogues of the left, and regular folk just won’t stand for it,” Pisciotta told Breitbart News. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly also took up the cause with a full-on panel on the offending tweet.

Ultimately, though, the campaign is about more than a couple of social-media postings: On its website, the “CookieCott 2014” campaign argues that the boycott is a protest of the Girl Scouts’ “deep and lasting entanglement with abortion providers and abortion rights organizations.” This includes, it claims, promoting role models like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Hillary Clinton, Amnesty International, ACLU, and the National Organization of Women, and supporting “youth reproductive/abortion and sexual rights” via its membership in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

The bullying seems to have worked: In a blog post Wednesday, Girl Scouts offered “our sincerest apologies,” noting, “To be clear, Girl Scouts has not endorsed any person or organization.” Is that sort of meekness is consistent with the organization’s quest to “build girls of courage, confidence, and character”? Ponder that while you try to resist those Samoas.

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Conservatives Don’t Want You To Eat Pro-Abortion Girl Scout Cookies

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Monarch Butterflies Can Survive the World’s Most Amazing Migration—But GMOs Are Wiping Them Out

by Michalak876 Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The monarch butterfly is a magnificent and unique beast—the globe’s only butterfly species that embarks on an annual round-trip migration spanning thousands of miles, from the northern US and Canada to central Mexico. And monarchs aren’t just a gorgeous bug; they’re also pollinators, meaning they help keep land-based ecosystems humming. Their populations have been plunging for years, and the number of them hibernating in Mexico last year hit an all-time low, reports University of Minnesota ecologist Karen Oberhauser. Why? Here’s Oberhauser:

Tragically, much of their breeding habitat in this region the US and Canada has been lost to changing agricultural practices, primarily the exploding adoption of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops in the late 20th and early 21st centuries … These crops allow post-emergence treatment with herbicides, and have resulted in the extermination of milkweed from agricultural habitats.

In a 2012 post, I teased out how crops engineered for herbicide tolerance wipe out milkweed, the monarch’s main source of food, and lead to the charismatic specie’s decline. And here’s the peer-reviewed paper, co-authored by Oberhauser, that documents the trend.

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Monarch Butterflies Can Survive the World’s Most Amazing Migration—But GMOs Are Wiping Them Out

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 30, 2014

by jp19gkx Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Marines of the riot control team for Golf Battery, Battalion Landing Team, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, attempt to subdue a role player wielding a weapon during the culminating event of the unit’s public disorder and non-lethal weapons employment training aboard Camp Hansen, Okinawa, Japan, Jan. 24, 2014. One of the secondary missions of Golf Battery is to serve as a non-lethal contingency force for the 31st MEU, useful in embassy security reinforcement, humanitarian operations and many other contingencies. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Paul Robbins/Released)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 30, 2014

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