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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

by ChantePuig9156 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Thursday night, at least one sniper in Dallas opened fire near a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, killing five police officers and injuring seven others. The shooting marks the deadliest attack on law enforcement in the United States since 9/11. While there has been an outpouring of grief and anger on social media, some high-profile individuals—including a former congressman and a veteran policy adviser to Republican leaders—stirred threats of violence and impending “war” against the Black Lives Matter movement.

From former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, in a post that has since been deleted:

Twitter

More from Walsh:

From Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and radio show host:

From Frank Gaffney, president of the right-leaning Center for Security Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz:

The New York Post‘s front page declared “Civil War”—which quickly drew a fierce backlash.

On his radio show today, right-wing host Rush Limbaugh called Black Lives Matter “a terrorist group committing hate crimes”:

The full transcript of Limbaugh’s remarks: “I found a story from March, I think, of 2015, in which President Obama welcomed two founders of Black Lives Matter to the White House and commemorated them and their efforts and praised them as being better organizers than he is. And… Black Lives Matter was just exactly who they are then as who they are today. They’re a terrorist group. They’re quickly becoming a terrorist group committing hate crimes.”

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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

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Harry Potter implicated in first driverless car death

by LeaMichalski Posted on July 1, 2016

Harry Potter implicated in first driverless car death

By on Jul 1, 2016Share

A man died in a car crash while his Tesla sedan was in autopilot mode, the company announced on Thursday. It was the first known fatality involving a self-driving vehicle.

The accident, which occurred in on a Florida highway in May, killed Joshua Brown, 40, a former Navy SEAL from Ohio. Traffic safety regulators opened an investigation into the collision. Tesla described the accident on its website:

What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S.

Brown was an advocate for self-driving technology and maintained a YouTube page with videos of his Tesla Model S driving on autopilot. One video, now viewed more than 2 million times, shows his Tesla — which he called “Tessy” — narrowly avoiding a collision. “Tessy did great,” Brown wrote in a caption under the video. “I have done a lot of testing with the sensors in the car and the software capabilities. I have always been impressed with the car, but I had not tested the car’s side collision avoidance. I am VERY impressed.”

While Tesla recommends that drivers keep their hands on the wheel at all times, even while autopilot is engaged, Brown, according to the driver of the tractor trailer, was watching a Harry Potter film at the time of the accident. “It was still playing when he died and snapped a telephone pole a quarter mile down the road,” driver Frank Baressi said in an interview with the Associated Press. A portable DVD player was found in the car after the accident.

While self-driving vehicles have been heralded by some technologists as safer and more efficient than standard vehicles, others argue that the technology could have major negative impacts on transportation systems — including by putting more cars on the road. One study found that automated technology could increase vehicle miles traveled by as much as 60 percent. As Roland Hwang, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s transportation program, put it, “There’s a utopian vision of what this looks like, but there’s also a dystopian vision.”

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Harry Potter implicated in first driverless car death

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Trump Duly Slapped, Elizabeth Warren Returns to What She Does Best

by VYXChrista Posted on June 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Fresh from her first appearance on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday returned to her favorite activity: going after Wall Street. With Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Warren submitted a bill aimed at strengthening regulation of the derivatives market, now notorious for its contribution to the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Derivatives are contracts whose value is derived from (and changes according to) the value of other assets, which allows parties in the contract to speculate, sometimes wildly, on the underlying asset’s value.

“The only way to make sure that derivatives can never lead to a financial crisis and taxpayer bailouts again is to put in place clearer rules and stronger oversight,” Warren said in a press release. A 2011 government report on the sources of the financial crisis found that a key role was played by so-called over-the-counter derivatives. The lack of regulation of these derivatives was the direct result of government policy: a bill passed in 2000—over the warnings of Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chair Brooksley Born—that banned state and federal regulation of OTC derivatives.

This changed with the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which brought the OTC derivatives market under regulatory scrutiny. Warren’s bill, the Derivatives Oversight and Taxpayer Protection Act, now aims to build on that regulatory framework despite stiff opposition in the Republican-controlled Congress, where GOP lawmakers are working in the opposite direction. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, proposed legislation earlier this month aimed at dismantling large portions of Dodd-Frank. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump says he will dismantle Dodd-Frank if elected (although his statements have been short on detail).

A key provision in Warren’s proposal is aimed at increasing funding for the CFTC, which has seen its budget stagnate even as the markets it is supposed to monitor balloon. The agency has been complaining of inadequate funding for years: In 2013, former chairman Gary Gensler—now the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer—told Bloomberg Businessweek that the agency needed “hundreds of more people to swim through all this data.” This April, the agency’s new chair, Timothy Massad, urged a Senate subcommittee to increase the budget allocation for his agency.

Warren’s bill would allow the commission to collect user fees from the financial firms that it monitors, much like the Securities and Exchange Commission does, and thereby escape the uncertainty of the appropriations process. President Barack Obama first proposed switching to this kind of structure in 2011, but Republicans in Congress have opposed the plan, claiming that the appropriations process keeps the commission accountable to lawmakers.

The measure also attempts to address another of Massad’s complaints: The fines the CFTC is permitted to levy are not large enough to discourage wrongdoing. It raises the civil penalty per individual to $1 million and the civil penalty for other entities to $10 million. (Fines could be larger depending on the size of a person’s monetary gain or the losses caused by their actions.) It also closes a key loophole that has allowed US banks to move billions of dollars in swaps offshore, out of the eyes of US regulators. If the bill comes to a vote, this provision would likely face opposition; according to a Reuters investigation, major banks lobbied heavily to obtain the loophole in the first place. Other provisions would bring certain foreign exchange swaps under the CFTC’s supervision and put an end to the preferential treatment of derivatives in bankruptcy proceedings—an arrangement that critics say encourages Wall Street firms to enter into risky contracts.

All of this may seem somewhat technical and arcane—but as Warren sees it, the alternative to reform is a repeat of the 2007-08 crisis. Without further regulation, she said, “big financial firms will be able to rake in billions when things go well, then come back to taxpayers with their hands out when things come crashing down.”

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Trump Duly Slapped, Elizabeth Warren Returns to What She Does Best

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Are Wall Street Profits Fundamentally Based on Consumer Laziness?

by LoreenDavidson Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brad DeLong:

It used to be that we collectively paid Wall Street 1% per year of asset value–which was then some 3 years’ worth of GDP–to manage our investment and payments systems. Now we pay it more like 2% per year of asset value, which is now some 4 years’ worth of GDP.

He is responding to a post by Noah Smith that, when I click on it, turns out to be a response to me. My question was simple: finance is a very competitive industry, so how has it stayed so astronomically profitable for so long? Smith suggests that part of the answer is lending to households, but another part is asset management fees:

Asset-management fees are middleman costs that all kinds of players in the finance industry charge to move money around….The amount of wealth in the U.S. economy has soared since 1980 — just think of the rises in the housing and stock markets over that time — meaning that the middlemen in the finance industry have been taking their percentage fees out of a much larger pool of assets.

….But why have profits from these middleman fees stayed so high? Why haven’t asset-management charges gone down amid competition? In a recent post, I suggested one answer: people might just be ignoring them. Percentage fees sound tiny — 1 percent or 2 percent a year. But because that slice is taken off every year, it adds up to truly astronomical amounts. So if people are just ignoring what middlemen skim off the top, because each fee seems small, investors could be handing significant fractions of the country’s GDP to the financial sector out of sheer carelessness. That would certainly keep profits high; if many investors pay no attention to what they’re being charged, more competition can’t push down those fees.

So a combination of rising asset values and unchanging management fees can explain a large part of both finance’s growth and its continued profitability.

James Kwak has more here, basically suggesting that lots of people pay high fees for actively-managed funds deliberately. They figure that the higher price means better performance, just as a higher price usually means better performance in most areas of the consumer economy.

If Smith and Kwak are right, it means the enormous profitability of the financial system is based primarily on products sold to consumers (mutual funds, home loans), not to services offered to the rich or to the rest of the industry. Is this true? To find out, someone would have to break out industry profitability by product line (so to speak) and figure out where most of the money is coming from. Has anyone ever done that?

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Are Wall Street Profits Fundamentally Based on Consumer Laziness?

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Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong

by LaureneT40 Posted on April 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The CDC reports that the suicide rate was up again in 2014, and the Washington Post immediately offers some possible reasons. I’ve added numbers for easy reference:

(1) Last decade’s severe recession, (2) more drug addiction, (3) “gray divorce,” (4) increased social isolation, and even (5) the rise of the Internet and social media may have contributed to the growth in suicide, according to a variety of people who study the issue.

But (6) economic distress — and dashed hopes generally — may underpin some of the increase, particularly for middle-aged white people. The data showed a 1 percent annual increase in suicide between 1999 and 2006 but a 2 percent yearly hike after that, as the economy deteriorated, unemployment skyrocketed and millions lost their homes.

David French comments:

There’s much more to say about this, but millions of our fellow citizens — friends and neighbors — are experiencing existential crises that are far beyond the ability of politics to solve. With civil society faltering, families fracturing, and millions of Americans “bowling alone,” the human toll will only continue to rise. God forgive our nation for believing we could build a culture without you.

Let’s slow down a bit. The causes of suicide are complex, and correlations are hard to prove. Still, there are a couple of things we can say. First, there should at least be a correlation if you’re claiming causation, and second, the purported cause had better come first. You can’t blame increased suicide on things that didn’t happen until years later.

With that in mind, let’s look at recent suicide rates for men. Not only does this help us control for gender, but it’s also a less noisy set of data since men commit suicide at nearly 4x the rate of women. It turns out that suicide rates barely budged between 1999-2005, so I’m going to look only at 2005-14. The chart is on the right, with suicide rates divided into three 3-year buckets. Here are some things we can say based on this and other data in the CDC report:

The Great Recession (and economic distress more generally) doesn’t really fit the facts. The suicide rate went up the most from 2005-2008, before the Great Recession. It went up the least from 2011-14. But if prolonged economic distress was at fault, you’d expect just the opposite: no effect before the recession and the greatest effect after it had been grinding away for a couple of years with no relief in sight.
Drug addiction is more plausible—but only modestly. According to HHS, marijuana use is up since 2005, but that’s an unlikely cause of suicide. Cocaine, hallucinogen, and illicit prescription drug use is down. Heroin use and heroin dependence are up. Overdose deaths among heroin and prescription opioid users are also up—but they’ve been rising since 2002 and it’s unclear how many of these deaths are suicides anyway. More generally, overall drug addiction rates have waxed and waned over the past five decades, and it’s difficult to tease out a correlation between addiction and suicide rates over the long term.
“Gray divorce” has been a thing since the 80s, well before the suicide rate started rising. It hit the mainstream in early 2007 with the publication of Calling It Quits, also before the suicide rate started rising. What’s more, suicide rates have been flat among the elderly since 1999. It’s other age groups that have seen an increase. This is unlikely to be more than a minuscule cause at most.
Increased social isolation could be a cause, but the 2006 paper that kicked off this discussion suggested only that Americans had become more isolated between 1985 and 2004. This corresponds to a period when suicide was declining or flat. What’s more, a 2009 Pew study that replicated the 2006 research found a substantially smaller—possibly zero—effect.
Internet and social media could also be a cause, though I don’t really see what the mechanism is supposed to be. And that 2009 Pew study found that internet and cell phone users were less isolated than others.

We also know that suicide is up only among whites and Native Americans, but not among Hispanics or African-Americans. So any theory about the rise of suicide needs to at least engage with what might cause this. Are whites more economically distressed than blacks? That seems distinctly unlikely. Do they have higher drug addiction rates? Higher social isolation? More family fracturing? Maybe, but I’d like to see the evidence. And what about overall life satisfaction rates? They seem to have been quite stable over the past few decades. This doesn’t suggest that growing existential angst is the cause.

My point here is not really that the increase in suicide rates can’t possibly be due to any of these things. A deeper dive might implicate any of them. What’s more, a lot of these possible causes affect a lot of people. But although suicide has seen a large percentage increase since 2005, in absolute terms it’s only gone up by about 1000 per year. That’s a small number, which makes it really hard to tease out from large-scale effects. A mere 1 percent change in the Gallup life satisfaction index, for example, represents a couple of million people, so it’s unlikely to give us much insight into relatively tiny changes in the suicide rate.

So what is my point? Just this: writers need to be careful not to casually project their own sentiments or guesses onto a topic like this. Sure, the Great Recession might be the cause of more suicides. Maybe existential crises and fracturing families are the cause. Opioid abuse could be a factor. But just because these all seem plausible doesn’t mean they’re true. Likewise, just because you personally don’t like the direction of American culture doesn’t mean they’re true either—no matter how true they seem. None of them should be tossed out casually.

For my money, we flatly don’t know what’s causing the increase in suicides over the past decade. Based on the size of the numbers and the evidence at hand, if you put a gun to my head I’d probably guess opioid abuse was the biggest cause. But I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone else knows either.

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Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong

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First We Piss You Off, Then We Ask You For Money

by DorisVAWvf Posted on April 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ah, Twitter. Here’s something I got last night after writing a post about Hillary Clinton’s fondness for military intervention:

My Bernie cesspool! Regular readers were amused, since I’ve written dozens of posts supportive of Hillary. But no one should get a free pass. If Hillary Clinton is too fond of military intervention for my taste, then it’s best to say so. That’s especially true during a primary campaign, when it might actually make a difference.

MoJo’s head honchos agree, and they make their case in “Why We’re Tough On The Candidates You Like: The Case For Offending Some Of The People, All Of The Time”:

Mother Jones is a reader-supported nonprofit, and that means we rely on donations and magazine subscriptions for 70 percent of our annual budget. It also means that by April 30, we need to raise $175,000 from readers like you to stay on track.

So the easiest thing to do, in some ways, would be taking it easy on our election coverage so as not to upset any of you while we’re asking for your support—we know Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appeal to a lot of our readers. But taking it easy on anything is not in our DNA; in fact, it’s exactly the opposite of what (we think) you want us to do.

….Two years ago, when few were talking about Clinton’s links to the fossil fuel industry, we did a major investigative feature on her support for fracking as secretary of state; now her links to the fossil fuel industry are a big issue. Last summer, we ran the first in-depth piece on Sanders’ political evolution (and put an illustration of him on Mount Rushmore on the cover of our magazine); it took months for other major outlets to take him seriously. Since then, we’ve both covered the breaking news in the race and dug deeper on the strong points and weak points of both candidates—because that’s the job you want us to do.

Check it out and join the comments on the Facebook post if you’re so inclined. And if you want to support this kind of journalism, both in the magazine and here on the blog, help us out by pitching in a few bucks today for our spring fundraiser. You can give by credit card or PayPal.

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First We Piss You Off, Then We Ask You For Money

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Supreme Court Urges Nevada to Stop Hating on California

by DannieEyre25436 Posted on April 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Excellent news. The Supreme Court has confirmed that Nevada does indeed hate California and needs to knock it off:

Nevada has not applied the principles of Nevada law ordinarily applicable to suits against Nevada’s own agencies. Rather, it has applied a special rule of law applicable only in lawsuits against its sister States, such as California.

….The Nevada Supreme Court explained its departure from those general principles by describing California’s system of controlling its own agencies as failing to provide “adequate” recourse to Nevada’s citizens….Such an explanation, which amounts to little more than a conclusory statement disparaging California’s own legislative, judicial, and administrative controls, cannot justify the application of a special and discriminatory rule. Rather, viewed through a full faith and credit lens, a State that disregards its own ordinary legal principles on this ground is hostile to another State.

….We can safely conclude that, in devising a special—and hostile—rule for California, Nevada has not “sensitively applied principles of comity with a healthy regard for California’s sovereign status.”

The case itself doesn’t matter much. An inventor moved to Nevada and then sued California when it harassed him for back taxes. Nevada normally limits these judgments to $50,000 even if you win, but as long as you’re suing California, it turns out the sky’s the limit. The Supreme Court was not amused. Nevada can’t do that just because they think poorly of California’s laws.

But all is forgiven now. Come to the beach and relax, Nevadans! Don’t let the dark side consume you.

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Supreme Court Urges Nevada to Stop Hating on California

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Trump, Clinton Remain Way Ahead in New York Primary

by JaydenOconner Posted on April 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m not sure how reliable primary polling has been this year, but the Pollster aggregates are pretty clear for Tuesday’s primary in New York. Donald Trump retains a commanding lead on the Republican side, even though New Yorkers should know better, and Hillary Clinton is ahead of Bernie Sanders by 15 points in the Democratic primary. Both Trump and Clinton have increased their leads slightly since the beginning of the month.

Sam Wang forecasts that a big win in New York puts Donald Trump on track to win the Republican nomination outright with 1265 delegates by the end of primary season. His probability of getting 1237 or above is 64 percent. Hillary Clinton, of course, has basically already won the Democratic nomination thanks to her current lead in pledged delegates and her overwhelming lead in superdelegates. The Democratic primary has been little more than shadow boxing for at least the past month.

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Trump, Clinton Remain Way Ahead in New York Primary

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Donald Trump Is Very Easily Disgusted

by FletchePyh Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Consider the following five anecdotes about Donald Trump:

On Hillary Clinton’s late return from a debate break in December: “I know where she went — it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting.”
On Megyn Kelly’s tough questioning during a debate in August: “She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
On Elizabeth Beck’s request to take a breast pump break during a deposition in 2011: “He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there.”
On his well-known germaphobia: “Trump doesn’t even like to push a ground floor elevator button because it’s been tapped by so many people….Trump especially avoids shaking hands with teachers, since they are likely to be have been ‘in touch’ with too many germy kids. Trump has what he calls a borderline case of germaphobia — aka msyophobia — that the American Psychological Association defines as one of the more common forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
On his one-time friendship with notorious lawyer Roy Cohn: “By virtually all accounts, one of Trump’s closest friends early in his career was Roy Cohn….When Cohn was facing disbarment in the mid-’80s, Trump testified on his friend’s behalf as a character witness. For a while, according to Vanity Fair, the two men spoke ’15 or 20 times a day.’ Then Trump found out Cohn was HIV-positive. He moved swiftly to cut ties with his mentor, seeking out new attorneys and transferring his legal business to them. The sudden rejection stunned Cohn.”

This brings to mind Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral foundations, which suggests that although liberals and conservatives share a set of five innate moral roots, they prioritize them quite differently. Conservatives, for example, are especially sensitive to moral foundation #5:

Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination….It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants.

I wonder how strongly Donald Trump scores on this particular moral foundation? Pretty strongly, I’d guess. I wonder how much it explains his approach to politics? And I wonder how much it explains his popularity with a certain subset of conservatives?

It’s just a thought. But perhaps one of the things that unites so many of Trump’s longtime obsessions (immigrants, crime, kicking out protesters, anything to do with foreigners) is a fear of growing impurity in the body of the country. It might explain a lot.

UPDATE: I see that Alexander Hurst got here first. His take on Haidt’s moral foundations and Trump’s sensitivity to disgust is here.

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Donald Trump Is Very Easily Disgusted

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Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

by MaybellReddick Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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In response to my post yesterday about the tradition of truthtellers in Democratic primaries,1 a reader emails: “Offhand my guess would be that a lot of Bernie supporters think Obama proves that an outsider/rebel/truthteller can both win and end up a very successful president.” Another reader tweets the same sentiment:

Hmmm. I don’t think either of these is true. Obama didn’t run in the truthteller tradition. He ran more in the JFK/Clinton tradition: a young guy bringing the voice of a new generation to the White House. Obama was inspiring and wildly popular, but he didn’t spend his time explaining that we all had to face up to endemic corruption or tidal waves of money or demographic Armageddon. Just the opposite. He mostly sanded the rough edges off that kind of stuff. It was all hope and change and ending the partisan bickering in Washington.

As for Bernie supporters, I don’t think they view Obama as a rebel or a truthteller. Bernie himself is careful not to criticize Obama, but a lot of his supporters see Obama as basically a disappointment: just another squishy centrist who made some incremental progress and called it a day. In the end, we still don’t have universal health care; the banks are still running things; the Republican Party continues to obstruct; and rich people are still rich. That’s the very reason we need a guy like Bernie in the Oval Office.

This is certainly my impression, anyway. Am I wrong?

1A theme that Jamelle Bouie touches on in a much longer, more nuanced piece here about the Bernie insurgency. It’s well worth a read.

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Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

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