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Twilight of The Velvet Underground

by Roxana0876 Posted on November 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Velvet Underground
Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition
Rhino

The Complete Matrix Tapes
Polydor/UMe

Loaded was the most conventional of The Velvet Underground’s four studio outings. With gifted multi-instrumentalist John Cale long gone and drummer Maureen Tucker largely absent from the studio, Lou Reed steered the band away from the notorious sonic and emotional extremes of its early work, trying out a more mainstream pop approach, albeit with more wit and a darker undertone than your basic Top 40 song. The album features a few clunkers but also two of his most-lovable compositions in the form of “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll.” After the confrontational brilliance of early songs like “Heroin” and “Sister Ray,” these engaging anthems seem positively carefree.

This six-disc package includes a mono version, a surround-sound mix, a previously released live set from Max’s Kansas City, and a very lo-fi, previously unreleased live performance from Philadelphia. The high point is the disc containing demos and early versions, which offers hints of what Reed would have sounded like as a folk singer in an alternate universe, and shows him getting warmed up for his impending solo career. “Satellite of Love” would be one of the standouts of Transformer, his second post-Velvets effort and biggest commercial success, while “Sad Song” resurfaced on his third long-player, the harrowing masterpiece Berlin.

Prior to the sessions that produced Loaded, the Velvets played a series of shows at the San Francisco club the Matrix in November and December 1969. Four of those sets appear on The Complete Matrix Tapes and portray the quartet as a cohesive and efficient rock’n’roll band, not simply a vehicle for Reed’s solo aspirations. With Doug Yule taking over on bass and psychedelic keyboards, the group ranges from early gems like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” presented in a bluesy 13-minute version, and “Sister Ray,” which unfolds over 37 mesmerizing minutes, to the not-yet-recorded “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll,” heard here in looser, funkier incarnations. Much of the material on this fine four-disc collection has previously been released piecemeal on other archival packages, but The Complete Matrix Tapes is the best way to get a feel for the later Velvet Underground onstage, no longer revolutionary but still compelling.

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Twilight of The Velvet Underground

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Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

by BrentC68dttk Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Low-fat dietary dogma—and, by extension, the plethora of processed junk the food industry conjured up to indulge it—has passed its sell-by date. But cutting down on sugary foods can trigger rapid health improvements.

Those are the messages of two studies released last week. For the fat one, a team of Harvard researchers scoured databases looking for randomized, controlled trials—the gold standard of dietary research—comparing the weight-loss effects of low-fat diets to other regimens like low-carb. They found 53 studies that met their criteria for rigor.

The result, published in the British journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: low-carbohydrate diets “led to significantly greater weight loss” than did low-fat ones. People assigned low-fat diets tended to lose a small amount of weight compared to no-change-in-diet control groups, but cutting carbs delivered better results than reducing dietary fat. “The science does not support low-fat diets as the optimal long-term weight loss strategy,” lead author Deirdre Tobias of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said in a press release.

The study marks the latest indication that your fat-free fro-yo habit is not likely doing you any favors by cutting your fat intake. But its sugary jolt may be doing more harm than you already thought. That’s the suggestion of another new study, published in the journal Obesity, by a team led by longtime sugar critic Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist in at the University of California at San Francisco.

Lustig is a proponent of the idea that all calories aren’t created equal—specifically, that added sugars (in sodas, processed foods, etc.) do more harm than calorie-equivalent amounts of fats, starches, and complex carbohydrates. To test this theory, Lustig and his colleagues identified 43 kids diagnosed with obesity and metabolic syndrome—defined as a cluster of conditions associated with the risk cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes—and tweaked their diets.

For 10 days, the kids ate catered meals with caloric amounts equivalent to their previous diets but with all foods with added sugars removed, replaced with starches. Their overall sugar intake went from 28 percent to 10 percent (representing naturally sweet foods like fruit). Lustig summarized the results in an op-ed:

Diastolic blood pressure decreased by five points. Blood fat levels dropped precipitously. Fasting glucose decreased by five points, glucose tolerance improved markedly, insulin levels fell by 50%. In other words we reversed their metabolic disease in just 10 days, even while eating processed food, by just removing the added sugar and substituting starch, and without changing calories or weight. Can you imagine how much healthier they would have been if we hadn’t given them the starch?

It’s important to note that the results are suggestive, not conclusive. Unlike the studies conglomerated in the low-fat paper, Lustig’s project did not include a control group.

But both the Harvard study and Lustig’s reinforce an emerging consensus that fat is not necessarily a dietary devil, while quaffing sugar at typical US levels might just be.

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Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

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This Film Could Change How the Right Wing Feels About Guns

by AugustaHerndon Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Evangelical Pastor Rob Schenck was a radical anti-abortion activist who hadn’t put too much thought into gun rights. But rattled by a mass shooting at Washington’s Navy Yard, something inside him shifted; he soon began to question gun culture from a moral standpoint and later preached about the human cost of gun violence instead.

His pivot drew the attention of filmmaker Abigail Disney, grandniece of legendary entertainment mogul Walt Disney. In her gripping directorial debut, The Armor of Light, Disney follows Schenck’s self-exploration into the muddied world of gun control in America. Disney accompanies Schenck to shooting ranges, a National Rifle Association convention, and even a memorable meeting with Lucia McBath, whose son Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a Florida gas station. Along the way, she finds herself wading with Schenck into a moral conflict at the heart of the debate: whether it’s possible to be both anti-abortion and pro-gun.

Mother Jones spoke with Disney about her family’s relationship with the NRA, her friendship with Schenck, and how the documentary shaped her own views on the polarizing gun debate.

Mother Jones: At the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this summer, you mentioned you had a completely different documentary in mind. What was that original idea, and how did it shift to the documentary you eventually made?

Abigail Disney: It was that conservatives and conservative values aren’t really reflected in the radical values of the NRA. And the other idea was that the NRA is not what you think it is: It’s an evolving, ever-changing organization, and it has not always been this radical, right-wing arm of the Republican Party, and that the history of the NRA is in fact really interesting.

All of that really fell away because there’s a real difference between a documentary that was all about facts and history and information. People just don’t get as engaged in that kind of documentary—they don’t fall in love, they don’t cry, they don’t forget who they are, they don’t ride with you. As we realized we had richer, vérité kind of people, what we wanted to do is focus in on the vérité story.

MJ: That original idea delved more into your own family background. Can you tell me a bit about that?

AD: That’s right. I almost forgot about that. When I sat there in 1971 and watched my grandfather open Walt Disney World, I was a little 11-year-old girl who worshiped the ground he walked on. You probably couldn’t have found much daylight between the NRA and the Disney company. They probably would’ve had had identical demographics for the people who really loved those companies. Then in 2008, in Florida, you have them up against each other in a court, because one of the Disney employees has decided to, because he’s an NRA member, challenge Disney’s no-gun policy for employees. How does it happen in not very long, 38 years, that you go from two companies with almost identical constituencies to fighting each other in a court of law about a fundamental issue?

Abigail Disney John L.

MJ: What drew you then to Rob Schenck’s story in particular?

AD: While we were looking at how we were going to talk about Florida, that’s how we met Lucy McBath. We met Rob, and he was such an interesting story. His whole life was interesting. He ended up being such an eloquent man and a deeply thoughtful and sweet person, which was not what I expected when I first met him. That upended the whole project.

MJ: Why choose this evangelical pastor as the subject through which you’re examining the national gun control debate?

AD: There are very few people who have committed more to the pro-life discourse than Rob has. He’s spent time in jail. He has really lived it. He has committed everything he’s had to it. If in fact he believes that every human life was sacred, I knew that if he had his conscious awakened, I knew he wouldn’t be able to close his eyes to it.

MJ: Was he receptive to you focusing on his internal debate?

AD: Oh my God, yeah. It’s a tough subject for him to talk about. It was almost all risk and not a lot of reward. But he recognized that right out of the gate, because he knows how high feelings run on this issue. He saw the writing on the wall. Yeah, of course, he was reluctant. We met over dinner in Union Station in Washington. We had a three-hour conversation that first time. And he said, “Thanks a lot. Now I have to go home and think about this. I’m going to go pray on this and we’ll get in touch.” Laughs. I checked with him every Monday for five weeks, and every week he would say, “I’m still praying.” By the end of the five weeks, I was pretty sure he was going to say no to being in the documentary. So I was pretty shocked when he said, “There’s a deep moral failing in the center of my community, and I can’t pretend I don’t see it anymore. So with or without you I have to go forward.”

MJ: How did you get him to agree to let you act as a fly on the wall as he went through this self-exploration?

AD: I keep wondering if everybody on the political left had someone who they were separated at birth from. Wouldn’t that be interesting if that were true? Once we got to know each other, we had such similar impulses. We saw in a similar way, and we developed a strong friendship. We would talk on the phone for hours, philosophically and theologically, about all of these issues. Around the edges of the film, this lovely friendship started to form. And that’s why he was willing to trust me. He signed a release right away, and I said to him, “I think you’re signing this because you’re afraid you’ll chicken out.” And he said yes. Laughs. He could’ve stopped cooperating, but he trusted me. I feel so grateful for that.

MJ: You mentioned that you and Rob disagreed on a few things. Did that disagreement factor into the documentary at all?

AD: It didn’t, but it impacted the world around the edges of the documentary, and it continues to affect us. Now that we have a friendship, we can engage in those issues. It’s not like dropping an atomic bomb in the middle of everything because we’ll stay friends no matter how we disagree. We do tease each about the things we disagree about. I don’t judge him, and he doesn’t judge me. It’s powerfully important for me as a pro-choice person and person who supports Planned Parenthood to have Rob accept me as not a baby-killing horrible person. That’s actually a massive step away from his original position, and he’s taking a lot of heat in his world just for being my friend, just for hanging around with me.

MJ: One of the most poignant moments in the documentary was the one when Lucy McBath meets Rob at his place. How did that moment come together?

AD: I get very close to people when I’m shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob’s office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.

MJ: What is Rob Schenck up to now? How has his life changed since the documentary’s release?

AD: He’s definitely lost funders to his not-for-profit. He’s lost friendships. He’s a really relational person, so that’s really hard on him. He takes that personally. He’s been surprised by the amount of support we’ve gotten. I’ll tell you: I’ve taken heat from lefties. It’s like, “How dare you let these people speak for themselves? How dare you not make fun of them? You let Rob off too easily for his abortion work. You don’t show us the whole depth of what a horrible person he is. Why are you letting him off so easy?” I’ve taken it from feminist friends, and I’ve taken it from lefty friends too. But that reassures me. If the right is attacking us and the left is attacking us, that’s exactly where we want to be.

MJ: Do you and Rob still differ in the way you approach gun control issues?

AD: He would talk about it as an Evangelical. I could develop every argument that I had for gun control, but I could never have done what Rob did, which was to say: In respecting the Second Amendment, you have to be very careful not to violate the Second Commandment. Only an evangelical could’ve arrived at that. When you say the Second Commandment, you will not take any image before me, which means you can’t worship the image or the crucifix itself. You have to worship God. When you worship an idol, you’re substituting a thing for the ultimate. So therefore, in worshipping the Second Amendment and taking your orders from the Constitution over and above your orders from the Bible, are you in fact violating the Second Commandment? Evangelical ears perk up when you suggest the Second Commandment is being violated. That gets their attention. I never would’ve known that nuisance about these people, so Rob’s able to get under their skin in a way that I never could have.

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This Film Could Change How the Right Wing Feels About Guns

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This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now

by RockyHTUNv Posted on October 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon, Indonesian President Joko Widodo cut short a visit to the United States and headed home to oversee efforts to extinguish a rash of epic wildfires that have engulfed his country.

Joko was in Washington, DC, for a photo op with President Barack Obama, to talk about climate change, and to promote Indonesia as a choice venue for foreign investors. His trip was also supposed to include a stopover in San Francisco for meetings with tech industry executives. But Joko’s decision to return to Indonesia early underscores the challenges his country faces in stopping the worst deforestation on Earth—deforestation that is playing a critical role in global climate change.

There’s more to global warming than pollution from cars and power plants. In the United States, coal-fired power plants are the No. 1 source of carbon dioxide emissions, followed by tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. That’s why the Obama administration has focused its climate policies on those sources; Obama’s signature plan aims to reduce power-sector emissions by one-third by 2030. Those policies get some natural help from the ecosystem, as trees and soil soak up carbon out of the atmosphere. In the United States, thanks to forest conservation and climate-friendly farming practices, land use (a term climate wonks use to describe emissions that come from the land rather than from man-made infrastructure and vehicles) actually offsets about 13 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from the rest of the economy.

But on a global scale, land use is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink. The biggest culprit is deforestation: Living trees store carbon; dead trees release it back into the atmosphere as they decompose. Emissions from crop soil, fertilizer, and livestock also play a major role. Overall, land use accounts for about one-quarter of the world’s total greenhouse gas footprint.

In Indonesia, the situation is even more dire. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), land use represents 61 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That means deforestation causes far more climate pollution than all of the country’s cars and power plants combined.

In fact, Indonesia has the world’s highest rate of deforestation, even higher than Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon rainforest. From 2000 to 2012, according to research published in Nature, Indonesia lost more than 23,000 square miles of forest to logging, agriculture, and other uses. That’s roughly the size of West Virginia. In 2010, the government attempted to put the brakes on deforestation by exchanging a two-year moratorium on new logging permits for $1 billion in aid from Norway and the United States. But according to Susan Minnemeyer, a forest analyst at the WRI, that policy appears to have had the “perverse impact of accelerating deforestation, because those with permits felt that they had to take action quickly or they would no longer be able to.”

This all adds up to global-scale pollution: Indonesia is the world’s fifth-ranking greenhouse gas emitter, coming in just behind Russia and India. In other words, we can’t stop climate change without saving Indonesia’s rainforests.

Indonesia is in the middle of a public health crisis from forest fire haze. The problem isn’t just deforestation, but how that deforestation is happening. In Indonesia, forests are often cleared out with fire. This can be done legally with a permit, but it’s often carried out illegally as well. This year, forest fires are also being fueled by El Niño-related weather patterns. The combination of El Niño and intentional deforestation has proven incredibly dangerous: The country has experienced nearly 100,000 fires so far this year, the worst since the last major El Niño in 1997. Fire activity typically ramps up in September and October, the end of the dry season, and over the last couple of weeks the conflagrations have grown to crisis proportions—hence Joko’s hasty return. The fires are so big they can be seen from space.

The greenhouse impact from those fires is staggering: On several days over the last month, emissions from Indonesian forest fires have exceeded all emissions from the US economy:

World Resources Institute

To make matters worse, more than half of those fires occur on land made of peat, the thick, soil-like material made from decomposed plant matter. Peat is packed with carbon, and fires that occur on peatland can have a global warming impact 200 times greater than fires on normal soil, according to the WRI. Last week, Joko said the government would stop issuing new permits for commercial development on peatland, but that won’t stop the fires that are already burning.

Climate pollution is just part of the problem. Firefighting costs are pushing $50 million per week. The impact of this fire season on Indonesia’s economy could reach $14 billion. And the thick blanket of haze that is stretching from the country across Southeast Asia has caused at least 10 deaths from haze-related illness and 500,000 cases of acute respiratory illness.

Your snacks and makeup are part of the problem. Of course, Indonesians aren’t just chopping and burning down trees for fun. Besides logging, one of the main uses for cleared land is to plant African oil palm, the fruits of which are used to produce palm oil. Palm oil is the world’s most popular form of vegetable oil, and half of it comes from Indonesia. It’s also found in about half the processed food you encounter in a grocery store (as well as many cosmetics).

Palm oil has some advantages over other oils: It’s cheap to produce and doesn’t contain trans fats, and the trees yield far more oil in the same land area—using fewer chemical fertilizers—than soybeans or sunflowers. According to the World Bank, the increase in global demand for cooking oil by 2020 could be met with palm oil using one-seventh the land area that would be required to fill that demand using soybeans. For that reason, it could actually have many environmental advantages over other types of oil.

Unfortunately, much palm oil production now happens in highly vulnerable ecosystems, often in the former habitats of endangered animals such as tigers and orangutans. Pressure is growing on Indonesia’s palm oil producers to stop deforestation and stay out of sensitive areas. A handful of major US food processors, including Nestlé and PepsiCo, have adopted commitments to rid their supply chains of palm oil linked to deforestation, according to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. But that report also that found many fast-food chains are lagging behind. Last year, an Indonesian court ordered the first-ever major fine—$30 million—for a palm oil company found to have cleared forest in protected orangutan habitat.

Indonesia’s climate test. For the international climate negotiations coming up soon in Paris, Indonesia has pledged to increase its emissions over the next 25 years by 29 percent less than it would have under a “business as usual” scenario. That won’t be possible without curbing forest fires and deforestation. So for Indonesia, getting a grip on palm oil producers will be even more important than going after power plants, as Obama is doing. Joko has been moving in the right direction, Minnemeyer said, but it’s unclear how his promises will hold up.

“Across the board, there has been very weak enforcement of Indonesia’s environmental laws,” she said. If they’re going to meet their climate target, “the fires are going to be a key part.”

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This Could Be the Worst Climate Crisis in the World Right Now

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There’s a New Video Game Where You Can Run Your Own Private Prison. It’s Strangely Addictive.

by DaniloIredale Posted on October 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s late at night and I am staring at my computer screen, contemplating a decision: Do I go to bed or reorganize my prison so that medium- and maximum-security inmates go to chow and the yard at separate times? It would probably help bring the violence down. Or I could design a separate walkway from the maximum-security cellblock to the yard and put a fence down the middle to separate the dangerous from the more vulnerable inmates. This could easily take hours. This is why I swore off video games 15 years ago.

Around the same time that I quit gaming, developers Chris Delay, Mark Morris, and a couple of college friends began developing niche games in an industry dominated by blockbuster-driven companies with megabudgets. Their small, London-based company, Introversion, eschewed flashy graphics in favor of nuanced story lines and strategy. They designed a game about hackers and a sci-fi strategy game, Darwinia, which won the Independent Game Festival Award.

By 2010, the team was in a slump, and Delay took off on a vacation to San Francisco. During a tour of Alcatraz with his wife, the idea hit him: Why not design a game around a prison? Not an action-packed first-person shooter, but one where you play the CEO of a private prison company, tasked with designing, building, and managing your own lockup? Delay didn’t know much about prisons, but the more he researched—interviewing guards and former inmates—the more he realized they were ripe for the most complex of Sim City-style games.

Introversion, now with a staff of nine, spent the next five years designing Prison Architect. They released a beta version in 2012 and attracted more than 1 million players. It was their biggest hit, and they released the full version this month.

Like most simulations, the game has no real end point. The purpose is to delve ever deeper into a system you create, to wrestle with your own beliefs and morality in a fictional world whose mechanics bear a striking resemblance to real-life prisons.

Delay and Morris say they strictly avoided leading players to a particular moral conclusion. “We are not prison reformists,” Morris told me. “There is no agenda here.” This, ultimately, is what makes the game succeed. There is no secret trick to making your prison function well, and since you can’t really win, the very idea of what constitutes a successful prison is yours to interpret.

Introversion Software

Prison Architect is not an easy game. Newcomers go through a “campaign mode” tutorial where they are thrown into a succession of five prisons and tasked with fixing various problems. The learning curve is steep—I probably spent 20 hours working through it—but subplots about mob assassinations, an execution, and a prison CEO burning documents during a riot create tensions to string you along.

The real game, however, is a blank slate. You are given a piece of land, $30,000, eight construction workers, and 24 hours (24 minutes in game time) before your first eight prisoners arrive. You can adjust how many you take in each day, but as with real private prisons, inmates equal revenue. And even if profit isn’t your motive, you need money to operate.

Inevitably, you begin with certain necessities. You need to contain your prisoners, so you lay a foundation for temporary holding cells. You need to hire a warden, and the applicants range from even-tempered to inflexible, politically connected, or corrupt. The warden needs an office with a desk and filing cabinet to work in. The prisoners need to eat, of course, so you put up a kitchen and hire a couple of cooks. You quickly learn from your mistakes—prisoners walk off if they are not fenced in; toilets don’t function without a water pump and plumbing.

It’s once you master the basics that things get interesting—do you want to build a Scandanavian-style model of reform or a totalitarian hellhole? Do you want to take a stab at remedying the challenges of the US prison system, figuring out how to manage maximum-security prisoners without solitary confinement?

I decide to invest heavily in rehabilitative aspects. I make the cells spacious and well furnished. I put pool tables in common areas. I prioritize visitation and a library. I build a classroom and start up basic education, drug addiction treatment, and job training. The deeper I get, the more I find myself thinking like a prison bureaucrat. I stop paying attention to the particulars of each inmate’s rap sheet and hire a psychologist who gives me reports on the population as a whole, measuring everything from overall hygiene to spiritual fulfillment. Morale, I am happy to note, is high.

But then things start to slip. More prisoners are coming in than I have cells for. I need a new cellblock, which involves running electricity to the building, constructing cells, bringing in beds, building a day room, and more. As my workers build, I notice that prisoners aren’t getting enough food. Are there enough tables in the canteen? Do they need more time to eat? More cooks? Someone gets bloodied in the shower room. Should I assign a guard to watch over it from now on? Should I shake down the whole prison to get rid of any weapons? In focusing on prisoner well-being, I’ve neglected my staff, which is now getting exhausted. Should I build a break room and hire more guards so they aren’t so overworked, or invest in surveillance cameras and lay some off?

Before I know it, my growing list of issues has put the inmates on edge. One shanks a fellow prisoner in an overcrowded holding cell. Another has a hammer—did I not have enough guards in the workshop? A riot breaks out. The holding cell catches fire and the inmates run amok, killing guards and each other. Someone offs the chief of security—I didn’t give him a locking door!—which means I can’t give guards orders until I hire a new one. I call in riot police and the fire department. When things start to calm, I build a mortuary for all the bodies and decide I need to hire a dog patrol and maybe turn my new chapel into an armory.

Introversion Software

This is just the drift of my particular game. I learn that security lapses will lead to problems no matter how well you treat inmates, but tough-on-crime players will quickly find that denying privileges or raising the stakes for parole makes for a rowdy prison. They can beef up security, sure, but at some point they will realize money can only buy so many solitary cells. Inmates in the hole can’t do grunt work around the prison, so they will need to hire more janitors and cooks. They will also need extra guards to bring food to inmates who aren’t allowed to go to chow. Sooner or later, they might need to reconsider their approach: Should they just let it slide when inmates get caught boozing or hiding cigarettes?

Prison Architect is amazingly intricate, but the gamification creates certain falsehoods. Real private prisons, for example, aren’t rewarded when inmates get released. In real life, the only practical incentive for giving prisoners meaningful things to do is that it tends to keep them calm. Companies don’t get more money for turning out prisoners who don’t go back to crime.

There are also some major omissions. Race is functionally meaningless in Prison Architect. Morris says they were wary of “playing lip service to the issue,” though he is considering how race might be integrated into a future version. Inmates could be assigned traits like race, sexuality, and religion, and a small bias could be built into the game, he says, that makes prisoners congregate in communities that match their identities: “Once you’ve got that congregation occurring, it might be possible to model hatred.” A particularly hateful inmate might be prone to attacking members of another group, which could spark events like the race wars that have broken out in real US prisons. This would offer the player a new set of conundrums: Do you segregate by race? Lock the more hateful inmates in solitary? Try to create programs to help lower prisoner aggression while making sure inmates don’t run into someone they might stab in class?

The game makers say Prison Architect wasn’t based on any particular prison system, but I find it hard to come up with a prison that veers very far from a US-style lockup. Even when I get better at controlling the population, my reform-minded prison quickly goes bankrupt. Large cells and sweeping rehabilitative programs are expensive, so when my government grants run out, I have to shut down classes and drug treatment. I lay off guards and start serving worse—cheaper—food. I ponder whether I should build a shop and train inmates to make license plates to bring in some revenue.

Herein lies the message: Prisons are just one piece of a larger system. How they are operated makes a difference, yes, but they exist within the constraints of budgets, legislation, policing, and the conditions that drive people to crime. As long as those remain the same, competing philosophies about prison management won’t amount to much more than tinkering, figuring out how to squeeze a dollar late into the night.

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There’s a New Video Game Where You Can Run Your Own Private Prison. It’s Strangely Addictive.

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Check Out the Homes of Some of the Bay Area’s Biggest Water Guzzlers—Including Billy Beane

by JaredSatterwhite Posted on October 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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One of the most frustrating things about the ongoing California drought is knowing that some people just don’t give a damn. Letting your lawn die and your toilet bowl turn yellow can seem absurd when you know that a few water hogs are keeping their gardens as green as Costa Rican golf courses (like the mystery Bel Air resident who uses 12 million gallons per year).

Citing privacy concerns, every major California water district has refused to name their biggest users. Until today.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District just released a partial list of homeowners who have violated its new excessive-water-use rules. In this district encompassing the cities and hills east of San Francisco, scofflaws are defined as those whose daily usage exceeds 1,000 gallons—four times the 250-gallon a day residential average.

EBMUD’s list of shame only covers customers who are billed in September, and excludes any who filed appeals. Yet it reveals many cases of egregious water use among the owners of massive properties in the East Bay hills. One of the largest violators is Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane, whose team is known as one of the most eco-friendly in baseball.

Here are the top five water guzzlers on the water district’s list—and aerial snapshots of their homes:

1. George Kirkland, former vice chairman of Chevron
Daily water use: 12,579 gallons
Location: Danville, California
Property value: $3.5 million
Mitigating factor: Kirkland told the San Jose Mercury News that there was a leak in a water line to the two acres of vineyards on his four-acre lot.

2. Mark Pine, venture capitalist
Daily water use: 8,091 gallons
Location: Alamo, California
Property value: $6.9 million

3. Billy Beane, vice president of baseball operations and minority owner of the Oakland A’s
Daily water use: 5,996 gallons
Location: Danville, California
Property value: $4.8 million

4. Dane Bigham, software executive
Daily water use: 5,747 gallons
Location: Walnut Creek, California
Property value: $891,000

5. Gene Yee, intellectual property attorney
Daily water use: 5,659 gallons
Location: San Leandro, California
Property value: $269,000
Mitigating factor: Yee’s water use is hard to explain given that he has very little landscaping. Perhaps he also has a leak?

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Check Out the Homes of Some of the Bay Area’s Biggest Water Guzzlers—Including Billy Beane

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Cops Kill Many More Americans Than the FBI’s Data Shows

by MUBCaseyumfu Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new investigation from the Guardian gives a detailed look at the deep flaws in the FBI’s database on fatal police shootings. The inadequacy of the federal data, which is built from information voluntarily reported by police departments, has come into view as the Guardian and the Washington Post have tracked officer-involved killings in 2015. FBI Director James Comey recently called the federal data “embarrassing and ridiculous,” and US Attorney General Loretta Lynch has announced a new program aimed at better tracking civilian deaths at the hands of police.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


Why No One Really Knows a Better Way to Train Cops


Video Shows Arrest of Sandra Bland Prior to Her Death in Texas Jail


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

The Guardian examined the FBI’s justifiable homicide data for the decade spanning from 2004 to 2014 and found:

In 2014, only 244—or 1.2 percent—of the nation’s estimated 18,000 law enforcement agencies reported a fatal shooting by their officers.
Several high-profile deaths, including those of Eric Garner in New York, and Tamir Rice and John Crawford in Ohio, were not included in the FBI’s count, as the police agencies involved did not submit their data for those years or report those incidents to the FBI. The NYPD, for example, did not submit data for any year during this period except for one, in 2006. Still the FBI’s count did not match up with the NYPD’s own data from that year, which the NYPD publishes in a separate annual report.
The FBI lists 32 ways of classifying the incidents based on the circumstances—but only one denotes killing by a police officer: “felon killed by police.” There is no category for cases where an officer killed someone who was not a felon. (See Mother Jones’ previous reporting on the FBI’s classification of justifiable homicides.)
Some police departments reported unjustified killings by cops as killings between civilians. Other deaths in which officers were charged or convicted, such as that of Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Malissa Williams, and Timothy Russell, did not show up at all in the FBI database.
A rise in the number of police shootings corresponded with a rise in agencies reporting their figures, obscuring any potential trends over the decade reviewed.

The Guardian included a chart showing the lack of reporting annually by states on fatal police shootings. Two of the nation’s most populous states, Florida and New York, barely reported any data at all:

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Cops Kill Many More Americans Than the FBI’s Data Shows

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One State Finally Cracked Down on Deceptive Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers

by QWCJaydentx Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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California on Friday became the only state to target anti-abortion pregnancy centers with a law cracking down on deceptive practices some have used to prevent or dissuade women from having an abortion.

The new law, which forces some crisis pregnancy centers to offer information about public assistance for reproductive services and others to notify patients that there are no medical professionals on staff, passed the California state assembly with a large majority in late May. Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed the bill on Friday night.

It is the first time reproductive rights groups have succeeded in pushing regulations on crisis pregnancy centers across an entire state; only a handful of cities or counties have passed similar laws. Shortly before the act became law, Amy Everitt, the director of NARAL Pro-Choice California, a reproductive rights group that helped draft the bill, said in an interview, “There is more to come.”

But the new law may represent the outer limit of what legislatures can do to regulate crisis pregnancy centers. The measure, called AB 775, almost certainly faces the same fraught legal battles that stalled similar regulations in cities including Baltimore, New York, and Austin. Those battles forced NARAL and its allies to be conservative in crafting the new regulations. For instance, the law cannot force unlicensed centers to inform women that the state health department encourages women to visit licensed medical providers for prenatal care. A new court fight could erode their options even further.

Reproductive rights advocates and public health officials have long sought to raise alarms about crisis pregnancy centers. Run by anti-abortion groups, crisis pregnancy centers sometimes provide pregnant women with misleading medical information in order to discourage them from ending their pregnancies. Others are ambiguous about whether they perform abortions or not in order to get women through the door. According to an investigation by NARAL, almost half of California’s crisis pregnancy centers promulgate the popular anti-abortion myth that terminating a pregnancy is linked to a patient’s chances of developing breast cancer. At the same time, NARAL claims, a majority of the state’s crisis pregnancy centers present themselves as neutral on the issue of abortion.

Abortion foes deny that crisis pregnancy centers engage in such subterfuge. “A woman knows her options,” says Sandra Palacios, a government relations executive with the California Catholic Conference, which opposed the law. “Women are smart. They know where they’re walking into—a safe place where they can get all the information about abortion alternatives.”

But as AB 775 was debated in the general assembly, many California medical professionals complained that crisis pregnancy centers offered their patients health care of dubious quality. In a letter to the legislature, Therese McCluskey, the perinatal services coordinator for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said many patients who transfer from crisis pregnancy centers to the clinics she oversees come without prenatal records, lab reports, or the pregnancy verification form that entitles them to pregnancy-related health care. Patients typically transfer at the point when they are too far along in their pregnancy to obtain an abortion.

At a Senate hearing on the bill, one OB-GYN testified that crisis pregnancy centers can pose a risk even for women who wanted to be pregnant and planned to carry their pregnancies full term. Sally Greenwald, of the University of California—San Francisco, is an OB-GYN and recalled taking over the care of a pregnant diabetic woman from a pro-life center. The crisis pregnancy center had failed to treat the woman’s alarming blood sugar levels. “The fetus was exposed to lifelong risks, such as cardiac malformations, brain anomalies, and spine deformations,” says Greenwald. “We could have lowered the sugar in her blood and we could have had better outcomes both for mom and for baby.”

There are nearly 170 crisis pregnancy centers in California. At least 40 percent of them are licensed by the state as medical providers. Unlicensed clinics are prohibited from providing medical advice. For instance, an unlicensed clinic could conduct an ultrasound for a woman, but it could not use the results to determine gestational age.

California’s new law places two types of restrictions on crisis pregnancy centers. It requires pregnancy-related service providers that are not medically licensed to disclose that fact to patients. For reproductive health clinics, including crisis pregnancy centers, that are licensed, the law requires that they provide patients with information about California’s financial assistance for family planning services, prenatal care, and abortion.

“This bill is sort of a lessons-learned bill from all the previous efforts,” says Everitt, of NARAL. As the group and its allies crafted the bill, she adds, they were “acutely aware” of how other bills to regulate crisis pregnancy centers—including some NARAL helped author—had failed in the past.

At the center of those past failures is a feud over whether abortion is a political or a health issue. Abortion foes claim that regulating crisis pregnancy centers is a violation of their right to express opposition to abortion. Reproductive rights advocates counter that the regulations are permissible because states have some latitude to regulate speech that is deceptive or coming from professionals licensed by the state. What is at stake is more than semantics: Supreme Court decisions have set a high bar for regulating political speech, but a low bar when it comes to individuals who are speaking as licensed professionals.

Regulating crisis pregnancy centers, even in blue states, has proved an elusive goal. Federal courts have struck down several laws forcing crisis pregnancy centers to make certain disclosures, such as informing women that they do not offer abortions, birth control, or referrals for those services.

Local officials in Baltimore, New York City, Austin, Maryland’s Montgomery County, and San Francisco have all attempted to regulate crisis pregnancy centers with mixed degrees of success. Federal courts are split over several laws forcing crisis pregnancy centers to disclose up front that they are not medically licensed or do not refer for abortion, and to specify which medical services they do or do not provide.

Attempting to avoid a similar outcome in California, Everitt says, NARAL enlisted the office of Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris. Harris’ office helped draft the bill from its inception with an eye toward eliminating openings for a First Amendment challenge—although a spokeswoman for Harris cautioned that the state’s involvement was no guarantee of success. Harris vocally backed the new law.

Their track record in federal court forced the drafters to leave what they saw as large holes in the new law. “We wish we could get crisis pregnancy centers to stop spreading scientifically unsound messages,” Everitt says, but such a law would likely be struck down in court.

Palacios said the California Catholic Conference intends to sue to block the law. A representative for a coalition of crisis pregnancy centers opposed to the bill did not respond to requests for an interview.

Everitt is confident the law would survive a court challenge. Her group was instrumental in drafting the San Francisco measure, passed in 2011, which has so far survived a legal onslaught. The law allowed the city to fine crisis pregnancy centers each time they falsely implied that they offered abortion services or referrals.

Just as she did in 2011, Everitt hopes the new law will become a national model, especially now that the umbrella organizations behind many crisis pregnancy centers push their affiliates to seek more medical licensing. Crisis pregnancy centers say it is a move to provide better care to women.

NARAL sees crisis pregnancy centers’ push for more licensing as a grab for legitimacy—and a tactical error. “The more there’s a relationship with the state, the more you have leeway to regulate crisis pregnancy centers,” says Rebecca Griffin, an assistant director for NARAL in California. “It’s an opportunity for us.”

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One State Finally Cracked Down on Deceptive Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers

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Quote of the Day: "Carly Cut His Balls Off"

by GilbertHancock Posted on September 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s been obvious to me for a while that the best way to get under Donald Trump’s skin is to attack him where it really hurts. Don’t call him a clown or an entertainer. That’s water off a duck. But he genuinely cares about his reputation as a dealmaker. Hit that. Or his reputation for being tough. Hit that. National Review’s Rich Lowry finally took this approach last night, and it worked:

“Let’s be honest: Carly cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon — and he knows it,” Lowry said on “The Kelly File.” Host Megyn Kelly was shocked. “You can’t say that!” she said, before covering her eyes with a hand. “You can’t say that.”

….Trump quickly exploded on Twitter and wrote in a tweet: “Incompetent @RichLowry lost it tonight on @FoxNews. He should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!”

….”I love how Mr. Anti-PC now wants the FCC to fine me,” Lowry tweeted, adding a hashtag: #pathetic….Lowry finally threw up a white flag and offered this tweeted compromise: “A deal for you, Donald: if you apologize to Carly for your boorish insult, I might stop noting how she cut your b**** off.”

See? Easy peasy. Now I want someone to take on his dealmaking acumen. It shouldn’t be too hard. That should really get him hot under the collar.

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Quote of the Day: "Carly Cut His Balls Off"

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The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

by krynicki Posted on September 23, 2015

The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

By on 23 Sep 2015 4:08 pmcommentsShare

The best part about the end of the world will undoubtedly be the photo ops. Whatever the cause — aliens, viral outbreak, our own self-destruction — the apocalypse will be nothing if not full of ruin porn. Planet of the Apes gave us this iconic image of the fallen Statue of Liberty; The Day After Tomorrow brought us a Manhattan skyline half covered in snow; 28 Days Later showed us the eerily quiet streets of a deserted London. But in real life, things might get a bit more Waterworld.

A recent report from NASA warned that a significant portion of the space agency’s infrastructure is now under threat due to climate change-induced sea-level rise. And as great as a defunct and inundated Kennedy Space Center would look in black and white, this is bad news. Here’s more from NASA:

Sea level rise hits especially close to home because half to two-thirds of NASA’s infrastructure and assets stand within 16 feet (5 meters) of sea level. With at least $32 billion in laboratories, launch pads, airfields, testing facilities, data centers, and other infrastructure spread out across 330 square miles (850 square kilometers)—plus 60,000 employees—NASA has an awful lot of people and property in harm’s way.

The average global sea-level has risen eight inches since 1870, NASA reports, but the rate of rise is getting faster and actually doubled over the last 20 years. NASA’s Climate Adaptation Science Investigators (CASI) Working Group recently reported that the agency’s five coastal facilities can expect between 5 and 27 inches of sea-level rise by 2050. It also warned that the coastal flooding that usually happens about once a decade in these areas will become more frequent. In the case of the San Francisco Bay/Ames Research Center area, it could become up to ten times more frequent. Here’s a look at how these areas will fair under a rise of 12 inches:

NASA/NOAA

John Jaeger, a coastal geologist from the University of Florida, told NASA that waves could be “lapping at the launch pads” of the Kennedy Space Center within decades.

So it looks like the moon-landing, Mars-exploring, child-inspiring space agency is in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, it wants to keep civilians safe by launching off of coasts. On the other hand, the ocean is trying to engulf it. At the same time, mean old Uncle Sam is cutting NASA’s allowance so much that it has to ask its Russian friends for rides to the International Space Station.

The agency’s report ended with a look toward the future. It’s pretty depressing, but if you imagine James Earl Jones reading it aloud amid slow pans of launch pads and space shuttles, astronauts walking in slow motion, and something symphonic playing in the background, you can’t help but believe that NASA’s going to figure this one out:

In some places, they will need to design smarter buildings; in others, they will retrofit and harden old infrastructure. If a facility must stay within sight of the water, then maybe the important laboratories, storage, or assembly rooms should not be on the ground floor. For the launch facilities, which must remain along the shore, beach replenishment, sea wall repair, and dune building may become part of routine maintenance.

But across the space agency, from lab manager to center director to NASA administrator, people will have to continually ask the question: is it time to abandon this place and move inland? It’s a question everyone with coastal property in America will eventually have to answer.

Seriously, though, more than half of U.S. citizens live on the coasts, and a recent study estimated that between $66 billion and $106 billion in infrastructure could be under water by 2050, and between $238 billion to $507 billion in infrastructure could be under by the end of the century. That’s a hell of a lot of ruin porn, but we seem to be doing OK with sparse abandoned factories and boarded up homes. How about we leave the serious stuff to Hollywood?

Source:

Sea Level Rise Hits Home at NASA

, NASA.

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The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

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