Tag Archives: human

Let Us Now Praise Baby Boomers. And Berate Them Too.

by LeiaBaltes Posted on November 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Post, it’s time for some intergenerational griping. Jim Tankersley kicks things off with a piece blaming boomers for our economic woes. Really? Here’s an economic history of the past 70 years: The US economy boomed for about three decades after the end of World War II, but ever since the mid-70s productivity growth has slowed down. That’s pretty much it. It’s not the fault of any particular generation. (Also: Tankersley should replace about half of his references to “boomers” with “Republicans.” This would improve the accuracy of his piece considerably.)

Heather Havrilesky picks up the ball by blaming boomers for forcing our nostalgia on all the rest of you. Sure. I guess. I’m not quite sure how this makes boomers different from any other generation, but whatevs.

Finally, Sally Abrahms gamely tries to fight back, arguing that boomers aren’t really all that rich, or healthy, or selfish, or technophobic, or sterile.

(Technophobic? Where does that come from? We’re the generation of the IBM PC, the Apple II, the internet, and the Palm Pilot.1 Please.)

I guess this is all good fun, but you know what? Every generation has its highs and lows. The generation that freed the slaves also brought us Jim Crow. The generation that brought us the gilded age also invented the telephone. The generation that invented relativity and quantum mechanics brought us World War I.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the highs and lows of the baby boomers. Then I’ll apologize:

President Bill Clinton. President George W. Bush. Plus a half claim to president Barack Obama.
Endless ads for pharmaceuticals on TV. The Sopranos.
Gay rights. Angry white men.
Star Wars. Star Wars prequels.
The rise of evangelical Christians. The rise of atheism.
Protesting the Vietnam War. Starting the Iraq War.
Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll.
John McEnroe. Dorothy Hamill.
Windows. The Macintosh.
Rolling Stones. Abba.
Feminist movement. Men’s rights movement.
Collapse of labor unions. Obamacare (half credit).
Doting on our kids. Complaining about coddled kids these days.
Giving a shit. Selling out.

Seems like a draw. Just like with every other generation. That goes for all you Greatest Generation folks too, who won World War II and then elected Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. We all have some stuff to answer for. So on behalf of boomers everywhere, I apologize for disco. Are you happy now?

1I was in a Microsoft store recently, and as long as I was there I asked about a problem I’d been having. The guy who helped me seemed knowledgeable enough, but was unable to diagnose my problem and rather blithely suggested I just blow everything away and reinstall Windows. I wasn’t too excited about this, and he gave me a look as if I were some pathetic oldster who just didn’t understand how easy it was. I felt like telling him that I bought my first Windows upgrade before he was born. (Windows 3.1. TrueType fonts!) Like military force, reinstalling Windows is a last resort, not a first option.

A day later I fixed the problem myself by deleting a directory and letting OneDrive start its initial sync from scratch.

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Let Us Now Praise Baby Boomers. And Berate Them Too.

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Ben Carson and the Tale of Redemption

by AdalberOreilly Posted on November 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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For those of you who may have missed it, the Wall Street Journal decided to check out another Ben Carson story yesterday. Here’s the story as recounted in Gifted Hands, about Carson’s time as a student at Yale:

Ben is broke. Finds ten-dollar bill on sidewalk. Thank you, Lord!
A year later, Ben is broke again. Looks for ten-dollar bill, doesn’t find one.
Ben gets notice that all the final exams in Perceptions 301 were accidentally lit on fire. He goes in for the retest.
The new test is really, really hard. A girl near Ben tells her classmate they should leave. “We can say we didn’t read the notice.”
Everyone starts leaving. Ben is conflicted. “I was tempted to walk out, but I had read the notice, and I couldn’t lie and say I hadn’t.”
Eventually Ben is the only one left. The professor comes back in with a Yale Daily News photographer. The whole thing was a hoax, she said. “We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class. And that’s you.”
Ben concludes the story: “The professor then did something even better. She handed me a ten-dollar bill.”
End scene.

And now for a couple of comments that I’ve seen this morning. First, Atrios remarks that the story is simply not believable. And that’s true. I assume that’s why the Journal decided to check it out. It sounded completely phony, and they concluded that it was, in fact, phony.

Second, Adam Serwer tweets that most of Carson’s deceptions and embellishments are unnecessary. His personal story is great without them. And generally speaking, that’s true. But in this case it’s not.

Here’s the thing: the beating heart of Carson’s personal story is about his redemption by God. So he says he had a violent temper as a kid, and then became a new man after praying in a bathroom one day. In fact, God turned him around so thoroughly that West Point offered him a full scholarship. He went to Yale instead, where the Lord took care of his finances when he was in desperate straits. And as a bonus, it was because of his Christian inability to tell a lie.

Are these embellishments unnecessary? Sure. But Carson knows his audience. Serious evangelicals really, really want to hear a story about sin and redemption. That requires two things. First, Carson needs to have been a bad kid. Second, redemption needs to have truly turned his life around. He was already a student smart enough to get into Yale, so he needs more.

That’s where these stories come in. He needs to exaggerate how violent he was when he was young. And after he finds God, he needs to exaggerate how great everything turned out. This culminates in the absurd story about his psychology class. No one who’s not an evangelical Christian would believe it for a second. But evangelicals hear testimonies like this all the time. They expect testimonies like this, and the more improbable the better. So Carson gives them one. It’s clumsy because he’s not very good at inventing this kind of thing, but that doesn’t matter much.

Not all of Carson’s deceptions follow this pattern. But several of them do. And they were far from unnecessary. Carson needed to sell his story to evangelicals, and that required a narrative arc as formulaic as any supermarket romance novel. So he gave them one.

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Ben Carson and the Tale of Redemption

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At Least 51 of My Colleagues Have Been Murdered Since 2003

by ElveraPerrone Posted on November 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chamelecón is a neighborhood in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where the streets are lonely and the houses are marked. On one side of the street, two initials stand out on the walls: MS, the familiar scrawl of one of the most feared gangs, or maras, in Honduras: Mara Salvatrucha. Just across the street, another block of homes have the number 18 written on them—the tag for Barrio 18, the rival gang that also has taken up refuge in Chamelecón.

In recent years, the 50,000 people who live in the neighborhood have been terrorized by the maras. It’s a lawless place where entering means risk—especially for a journalist. But that’s my job, so I went to Chamelecón to try to bring this world to my readers at the Diario la Prensa, the newspaper I’ve worked at for the past 10 years in San Pedro Sula, a city that some experts consider to be the most dangerous in the world.

I always go out reporting with a photographer and a driver, and this story was no different. On our way there, we passed through a bunch of the barrios and colonias controlled by the gangsters. People told us not to go beyond the school, because no one would be able to protect us there. But that didn’t stop us. Our mission was to take photos, get a better look at these abandoned streets, and explain how the gang bangers dominate turf and change the lives of thousands of families there.

It was two in the afternoon, and when we arrived a few teens on bikes, and some more hanging out on the street corners, sounded the alarm. Immediately one grabbed his cell. He was a bandera—that’s what they call the kids who tell the gang leaders that there are strangers present. My photographer was taking some shots from inside the vehicle when, just a few minutes later, one of the banderas approached. “What are you looking for?” he asked. We tried to explain our work, but he didn’t give us time to say anything. “You’d better leave, or there will be problems.”

“Being a journalist in Honduras is for the brave,” my friends like to say—and even more so when you’re reporting on violence, corruption, or drug trafficking. Honduran reporters always have their adrenaline pumping. The constant hustle for what we call la nota roja—the crime beat, more or less—can make us feel numb, especially on those days when 10 or more people die violent deaths.

Going beyond the official story can be like signing your own death warrant. Reporting on the underworld can mean only halfway telling the truth, since telling the whole truth can make you a target for criminals. Since 2003, for example, the Honduran human rights commission has counted at least 51 murders of journalists and media professionals, the majority of them in radio and television. The vast majority of their killers remain free.

In fact, investigating that world once forced me to leave the country. Like other journalist friends, I fled for a time after receiving some threats related to a story I’d worked on. Journalists in Honduras have sought asylum elsewhere, and even have looked to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights for protection. That is a reality that we face daily. Fear always surrounds us.

Still, sometimes you have to face it head-on. A few months ago, I wrote a series about hitmen and decided I needed to actually sit down with one face-to-face—not exactly an easy job. After several tries, I was finally able to negotiate an interview after a number of calls. The hitman made the rules.

The day arrived. Over the phone the killer told us the route, which brought us outside the city of San Pedro Sula; each kilometer was more uncertain than the last. We traveled about 30 killometers to a lonely place. My cellphone rang, breaking our silence—it was him, telling us to move a few more meters up ahead. We kept going, but no one was there. Then another call came, and this time he told us to stop the car and for all of us to get out.

Scared, we did as he told us. We didn’t know if he was going to attack us. Five minutes passed before we heard the sound of a motorbike, and we saw an armed man draw closer. He was tall, heavyset, with a hard face. From the moment he arrived he inspired fear, and the relatively short interview felt like it went on forever. I could feel the chill in his words. At 34, he confessed that he’d killed 17 people, and he said he’d continue killing to earn a living. At the end of the interview, he took the motorbike and left. On the ride back to the city, I couldn’t help but think about how we face death every single day.

Many people have asked me why I don’t stay in the United States or go to another country. I’ve thought about it, sure. When you’re always looking over your shoulder when you walk down the street, or when you don’t know whether to cover something because of the potential repercussions, you just want to go somewhere where you can feel safe, where you can do your job without being afraid.

In the end, though, I chose la nota roja. Sometimes it means you can’t tell the whole story, and sometimes it means telling the truth and putting yourself at risk. Here in Honduras, you learn to live with that fear.

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At Least 51 of My Colleagues Have Been Murdered Since 2003

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Who Is Ben Carson’s Mystery Physicist?

by Marya7iog Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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By now, we all know that Ben Carson thinks the pyramids were built by Joseph as grain silos. I’m sort of curious about where this idea came from, and maybe eventually we’ll find out. In the meantime, I’d like to highlight a different part of Carson’s pyramid speech:

“I recently had a discussion with a well-known physicist. He was talking about the Big Bang Theory and how all this obviously culminated into this wonderful, extraordinarily organized solar system that we now have, which you can set your watch by, where scientists can predict 70 years away when a comet is coming. That’s an incredible amount of organization to have originated from just a large explosion.”

Carson then tells the story of how he supposedly stumped the physicist by asking him how he could reconcile such an “organized” universe with the laws of thermodynamics, specifically entropy, which says that systems tend to move towards disorder.

“Well of course he has no answer for that. They never have an answer for any of these things.”

Huh. Not just a physicist, a “well-known” physicist. And Carson says this guy was floored by his question. Apparently he had never given any thought to whether the Big Bang theory was compatible with the second law of thermodynamics.

Conclusion: either this was the stupidest physicist ever, or else Carson was lying. I think you can guess which side I’m on, but Carson can clear this up in a trice by telling us who this hapless physicist was. I sure hope it’s not someone who’s conveniently dead.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s probably worth noting that conservative Christians are just generally a little gaga over the second law of thermodynamics, which they’re convinced disproves the theory of evolution. You can yell “In a closed system!” until you’re blue in the face, and it makes no difference. They’ve stumped you! There are dozens of more sophisticated versions of this argument, too. Carson is just extending this chestnut a little further back in time.

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Who Is Ben Carson’s Mystery Physicist?

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Do You Spend an Hour Waiting For Your Doctor?

by MarlysJacobs Posted on October 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new study has been making the rounds today. Over at JAMA, a team of researchers used one survey to calculate average time spent in face-to-face time with a doctor and another survey to calculate total average “clinic time” (wait time plus doctor time). If you subtract doctor time from clinic time, you get average wait time. That’s shown in the chart on the right.

But something isn’t right here. The takeaway is that minorities tend to have longer wait times than whites, which wouldn’t surprise me at all. (They also have longer travel times.) But even whites have an average wait time of one hour. That’s nowhere near this white boy’s experience for any of the doctors/medical systems I’ve ever been part of. What’s more, other studies suggest that average wait time is around 20 minutes or so, which seems more likely.

So….I’m not sure what’s going on here. Something about this study doesn’t seem right, and I don’t know if it’s in the methodology or in the interpretation everyone is putting on it. In any case, if you read about this study, I’d take it with a grain of salt for the moment.

Source – 

Do You Spend an Hour Waiting For Your Doctor?

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The World Has Gone Crazy Over Ad Blocking

by EmilyArcher Posted on October 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s pretty amazing. Ad blockers have been around forever. I’ve been using AdBlock Plus for nearly a decade and nobody ever cared. It was just a quiet little thing that a few power users knew about.

But as soon as Apple decided to allow ad blocking on the iPhone, suddenly the world went nuts. News headlines exploded. Half the sites I visit now check for ad blockers and hit me with guilt-inducing messages about how I’m bankrupting them if I decline to read their latest Flash creations and bouncing gif animations. Hell, I just got one of these messages on Phys.org. For a while, the Washington Post randomly declined to let me read their articles at all unless I removed my ad blocker.

I’ve got one question and one comment about this. The comment is this: Screw you, Apple. Everything was fine until you decided to barge in. The question is this: Is publisher panic over loss of ad revenue rational? Genuine question. I understand that mobile is where all the ad dollars are, and I understand that Apple accounts for a sizeable chunk of the mobile market. But is ad blocking ever likely to become a mass phenomenon, or will it continue to be used only by power users? I suppose there’s no way to know. In any case, the recent hysteria over ad blocking sure does show the incredible PR power of Apple. If you take something that’s been around forever—4G LTE, large screens, ad blocking—and slap it on an iPhone, everyone goes nuts. It’s Apple’s world and the rest of us are just pawns in the games they play.

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The World Has Gone Crazy Over Ad Blocking

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California Legalizes Assisted Suicide For Terminal Patients

by ColumbusReilly Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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After months of maintaining a stony silence about California’s right-to-die bill, Gov. Jerry Brown signed it today:

The Golden Rule isn’t always the best guide to public policy, but in this case I think it is. California has an obligation to make sure assisted suicide isn’t abused, either by doctors rubber stamping requests or by friends or relatives pressuring sick patients to end their lives. Beyond that, though, deciding when and how to die is about as personal a decision as someone can make. It’s not that assisted suicide doesn’t affect other people—it does—but as a matter of public policy it’s best for the state to remain resolutely neutral. This is something that should be left up to the patient, her doctor, and whichever of her friends, family, and clergy she decides to involve.

The text of the bill is here. Brown did the right thing today by signing it.

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California Legalizes Assisted Suicide For Terminal Patients

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House Dems Fight Back on Benghazi

by NevaLefler Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills testified before the Benghazi committee. Apparently several Republican members of the committee talked to reporters about this. Here is Politico on September 3:

Raising alarms on the right, Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, also told the House Select Committee on Benghazi that she reviewed and made suggestions for changes to the government’s official, final report on what happened in Benghazi, according to a separate, GOP source familiar with what she said.

The source said it “calls into question the ‘independence’” of the report’s conclusions….The report was supposed to be independent from state officials that may be involved, and the GOP argues top officials should not have had input, long questioning how independent the findings were.

Today, in the wake of Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s boasting about how the Benghazi committee had been a great tool to bring down Hillary, Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, lobbed a shot across the bow of the Republican chairman:

Republicans began leaking inaccurate information about Ms. Mills’ interview within minutes after your public declaration that it should be treated as classified….During her interview, Ms. Mills corroborated both Ambassador Pickering’s testimony and the Inspector General’s findings:

Q: Did you ever, in that process, attempt to exert influence over the direction of the ARB’s investigation?

A: No.

Q: Did you ever try to—did Secretary Clinton ever try to exert influence over the direction of their investigation?

A: No.

Ms. Mills also explained that the Secretary’s objective in selecting members of the ARB was, “could they be people who could give hard medicine if that was what was needed. And I felt like, in the end, that team was a team that would speak whatever were their truths or observations to the Department so that we could learn whatever lessons we needed to learn.”

….We believe it is time to begin releasing the transcripts of interviews conducted by the Select Committee in order to correct the public record after numerous inaccurate Republican leaks….Please notify us within five days if you believe any information in the full transcript should be withheld from the American people.

No response yet from committee chairman Trey Gowdy, who has insisted all along that the Benghazi investigation is purely an enlightened search for the truth with no trace of partisan overtones. But I’m all in favor of holding all of the committee’s hearings in public with occasional exceptions for genuinely classified testimony. Stay tuned.

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House Dems Fight Back on Benghazi

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Friday Cat Blogging – 2 October 2015

by BerenicBabb Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s Hopper playing hide-and-seek with the camera. In the background, Hilbert lounges about obliviously, probably waiting for dinner to be served.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 2 October 2015

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Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

by CarmeloPerkinson Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lots of people have asked lots of questions about Hillary Clinton and her email server. That’s fair enough. But I’ve got a couple of questions for the people with all the questions. There might be simple answers to these, but they’ve been bugging me for a while and I still don’t really understand them. Here they are:

One of the most persistent suspicions is that Hillary set up a private server in order to evade FOIA requests. But this has never made any sense to me. What could possibly have led either Hillary or her staff to believe this? There’s simply nothing in either the statute or in the way it’s been applied in practice to suggest that official communications are beyond the reach of FOIA just because they’re in private hands.

On a related note, what was going on in the State Department’s FOIA office? They received several FOIA requests that required them to search Hillary’s email, and responded by saying there was no record of anything relevant to the request. But the very first time they did this, they must have realized that Hillary’s email archive wasn’t just sparse, but nonexistent. Did they ask Hillary’s office about this? If not, why not? If they did, what were they told? This should be relatively easy to answer since I assume these folks can be subpoenaed and asked about it.

Generally speaking, the reason I’ve been skeptical about this whole affair is that the nefarious interpretations have never made much sense to me. What Hillary did was almost certainly dumb—as she’s admitted herself—and it’s possible that she even violated some regulations. But those are relatively minor things. Emailgate is only a big issue if there was some kind of serious intent to defraud, and that hardly seems possible:

Hillary’s private server didn’t protect her from FOIA requests and she surely knew this.
By all indications, she was very careful about her email use and never wrote anything she might regret if it became public.
And it hardly seems likely that she thought she could delete embarrassing emails before turning them over. There’s simply too much risk that the missing emails would show up in someone else’s account, and that really would be disastrous. Her husband might be the type to take idiotic risks like that, but she isn’t.

School me, peeps. I fully acknowledge that maybe I’m just not getting something here. What’s the worst case scenario that’s actually plausible?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m asking here solely about FOIA as it applies to the Hillary Clinton email server affair. On a broader level, FOIA plainly has plenty of problems, both in terms of response time and willingness to cooperate with the spirit of the statute.

Source – 

Two Questions About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

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