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We Talked to Hope Solo About Why the US Women’s Soccer Team Skipped a Game in Protest

by NickiSpeegle Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, Hope Solo and the US women’s national soccer team were getting ready for practice at Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium, where they were scheduled to play Trinidad and Tobago on Sunday in the seventh game of their World Cup Victory Tour. As the goalkeeper surveyed the artificial-turf field, she noticed the hardened white paint on the football yardage markings near her goal and the rocky surface that made practicing her footwork all the more difficult. Solo even reached down and pulled up the turf:

Megan Rapinoe, the team’s star midfielder, was on the players’ minds—just a day earlier, she’d torn the ACL in her right knee while training at the grassy practice field without contact. On top of that, there was the months-long fight with FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association over the use of artificial turf at women’s soccer venues.

And so the team decided not to play Sunday, laying out its decision in an open letter on the Players’ Tribune. On Tuesday, US Soccer president Sunil Gulati apologized, noting that the federation had “screwed up” and had failed to make sure field conditions were adequate for the Trinidad and Tobago match. In Gulati’s apology, Solo says that she saw the federation pushing for change. Gulati said that all US games leading up to the Olympics would be played on grass.

In the run-up to tonight’s game against Trinidad and Tobago at San Antonio’s Alamodome—on another artificial-turf pitch—we spoke to Solo about the team’s decision to not play and the larger issue of inequality between men’s and women’s sports.

Mother Jones: How do the field conditions at the Alamodome compare to that of Aloha Stadium?

Hope Solo: Laughs. They are night and day. I mean, it’s playable. That’s a huge difference in itself. But it’s still turf, and one day I just hope we could move away from turf. Maybe not completely, but maybe 80 percent of the time, I think I might be okay with that. I can speak for myself and the players: Nobody likes to play on turf.

MJ: Why do players prefer natural grass to turf?

HS: We’ve been fighting this battle for quite some time. Soccer, to be honest, is not meant to be played on turf. The ball rolls differently. There are dead spots on every turf field that you play on. It’s a lot harder on the joints, on the body, on the shoulders, on the knees. It’s a just a different playing game. With that said, you don’t see the men ever playing on turf. You don’t see any World Cups being played on turf—even when the major club teams come to America to play on a turf stadium, they lay sod.

MJ: I saw some stats that showed that 100 percent of men’s national games in the United States were played on grass since 2014, whereas 70 percent of your team’s games were played on grass. What do you make of that disparity?

HS: It’s not just the field conditions. There are major disparities between men’s and women’s sports across the board, but the playing conditions are a major one for us. The field that we stepped out on in Hawaii, that wasn’t just turf versus grass. That had to do with player safety. We knew we couldn’t risk ourselves with the Olympic Games being around the corner. We have careers to protect, and we knew that in Hawaii, we absolutely had to take a stand. We lost Megan Rapinoe to a subpar practice field, although it was grass. It was pretty magnified what was at stake for us, and it was time to be vocal about it.

MJ: Who on the team was the person who said “enough was enough”?

HS: Megan Rapinoe hurt herself a day before. There was this weird feeling at practice of “What the hell is going on?” We knew the drainage grates was way to close too the line. Our fields were bumpy. We weren’t sure if Rapinoe stepped on the grate or in the hole beside it, but it was a noncontact injury. It was really scary. The players were upset. The coaches were upset. The staff was upset. And right then, I started taking pictures of the practice field. You know, there were rumblings amongst the players.

We go to the stadium field. We start looking a little bit more at the field and bending over and picking up the little rocks. We see the huge bumps in the line, and the field turf actually pulls up. The media’s behind the goal, and they start seeing us looking at the field. And then we see our coach yelling at somebody, and our general manager starts thinking, “This isn’t okay.” We still practiced, because the fans were right there. I remember saying, “I’m not going to practice in that goal.” The far end was worse than the near end, so we moved everything to one end. But I told my goalkeeper coach, “I will not go into that goal.” I think I just had visions of another knee injury. We shortened the practice, and then right when we got on the bus, it was kind of like, “Hey guys, what are we doing?” We all discussed it right there on the bus, and right there we were just like, “We can’t do this.”

MJ: And like you said before, it’s not just the field conditions that are troublesome.

HS: It’s a number of different things. You look at the marketing money put into the men’s team vs. the women’s team. You really have to kind of tip your hat to the women’s team for selling out stadiums, because oftentimes you do that with less marketing dollars. We did a side by side analysis of the men’s contract and the women’s contract, and it’s very unbalanced, just the way that US Soccer’s money is invested from year to year. It’s just completely unbalanced. The argument is, well, women should not get paid as much as men, because they don’t bring in as much revenue. We hear it all the time. Our argument back is that we have the best ratings between the men’s team and the women’s team, and had we gotten more marketing dollars, we would have more ticket revenue. When we push for equality, we don’t want the exact same thing. We just want it more balanced.

When you look at the salaries for the men versus the women, when you look at the bonuses, and particularly for the men’s World Cup versus the women’s World Cup, we got a $1.8 million dollar bonus for winning the World Cup, and we had to disburse it among the 23 players. And then we piece out some bonuses for our support staff who don’t get paid a whole bunch. The men, for losing, got $8 million to share among the players, and they also received millions of dollars for every point that they received in the World Cup. We got paid nothing per point in group play. We got paid nothing for making it into the knockout round. We basically didn’t get a bonus until we won the entire thing, which is incredibly difficult thing to do, and that bonus was quite a bit less than what the men got.

MJ: What has the federation done to address that since the World Cup ended?

HS: We were able to take the side-by-side analysis, and we were able to say to US Soccer, “These are the facts. It is unbalanced. What are we going to do about it? Because you guys are a progressive federation, and you value the women’s team. Well, show us that you value us. Don’t just tell us. Show us.” We are able to have more meaningful conversations.

It’s a great starting point that they are willing to have these conversations. Before, we’ve tried to have these conversations, and the door had been shut. But I think right now, it has to do with the players being unified, but I also think it’s the times that we live in. We have some of these incredible female role models who are standing up and feeling unapologetic about it. And I think it’s empowered us to do the same.

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We Talked to Hope Solo About Why the US Women’s Soccer Team Skipped a Game in Protest

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Some Startups Actually Do Make the World a Better Place

by DeliaArchdall6 Posted on December 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Gabriel Metcalf co-founded City CarShare at the age of 26, the first technology platform to give urbanites easily access a car when they needed one—even for an hour—he wasn’t looking to cash in. Metcalf, an environmentally minded urban planner, had loftier goals. He envisioned a nonprofit car-sharing collective that would go mainstream, freeing Americans from the burdens of private car ownership and removing countless carbon-spewing vehicles from the road in the process.

Unlike your average tech startup, City CarShare was (and still is) an “alternative institution”—one that sets out to change the status quo by offering a new model for doing things. More examples? Worker-owned cooperatives. Community land trusts. And even good old representative democracy, which began in the colonies as a parallel system to British rule and provided the structural underpinnings for self-governance in the wake of the American Revolution.

Now 45, Metcalf no longer runs the car-sharing service. He’s president of SPUR, a Bay Area nonprofit that helps solve regional problems related to things like transit infrastructure, affordable housing, and climate change adaptation. But he’s still spreading his gospel via a new book, Democratic by Design, which explores the historical track record of alternative institutions, looks at what makes them succeed and fail, and calls on activists to incorporate AIs in their arsenal of solutions to society’s most intractable problems.

Mother Jones: With City CarShare, you hoped to out-compete the private automobile in the cities where you operated. Do you look back and think, “Boy, was I naïve?”

Gabriel Metcalf: No. Since we launched, car ownership has actually been declining quite a bit—for people who live in cities and for young people. I think we were tapping into something in the zeitgeist about Americans being sick of spending time sitting in traffic and not wanting to deal with the hassles of car ownership.

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Some Startups Actually Do Make the World a Better Place

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Yo La Tengo Is Here for the Long Haul

by HarrisSowers Posted on November 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yo La Tengo: Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, James McNew Jacob Blickenstaff

Coming out of the close-knit music community of late-1980s Hoboken, New Jersey, Yo La Tengo was the product of the romantic and musical relationship between guitarist and music journalist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley, the daughter of well-known animation producers John and Faith Hubley. With help from a rotating cast of supporting musicians, the husband-and-wife duo released four albums, including their 1990 breakout, Fakebook, before bassist James McNew came on board as a permanent and stabilizing member.

Last month, Yo La Tengo released its 14th album, Stuff Like That There, which serves as a companion of sorts to Fakebook. Both albums draw on an eclectic mix of covers as well as remakes of the band’s previously recorded songs. Guitarist Dave Schramm also returns to lend his guitar work.

Active for more than 30 years, the band owes its staying power to its ability to absorb and integrate a vast range of influences. Stuff Like That There singles out and connects some of those myriad points of reference—including The Cure, the outsider doo-wop of Sun Ra, and Yo La Tengo’s 1980s alt-rock contemporaries Antietam—to reveal the band’s musical center. I visited with the trio at their Hoboken rehearsal space.

Mother Jones: How did the thematic similarity between Stuff Like That There and Fakebook come to pass?

Ira Kaplan: We’ve been asked a lot over the years about doing another album like Fakebook. When people ask you to do stuff, it’s not your idea anymore, so it’s tough to get behind it. But over time, we started realizing that that didn’t make it a bad idea.

MJ: Reinterpreting and re-recording your own songs is something you’ve done on other albums, too. Do you think that’s unusual?

IK: It may be unusual-ish. James was just listening to Country Joe and the Fish—all the San Francisco bands were very free with the interpretations of their material. If you listen to Jefferson Airplane’s God Bless Its Pointed Little Head, the live versions of their old songs don’t sound much like the studio versions. The Velvet Underground’s live versions changed constantly. And as Beatles bootlegs keep surfacing, you hear all the different sketches and ways they approached things, so it’s always felt pretty natural for us.

MJ: When Georgia and Ira created Yo La Tengo, you guys were very much amateur musicians.

IK: I still feel like an amateur! I remember being in college and taking a class on classical music and getting a big laugh when I said very sincerely that I was not really into trained voices. Some of the greatest singers can transcend their technical perfection and still sound great.

Georgia Hubley: They have to get over that stumbling block of talent!

MJ: You seems always to be evolving, yet Yo La Tengo maintains a consistent core identity. Is that deliberate? Like, are there parameters that you follow?

IK: I don’t think there are really that many rules. We are willing to change, and we’re willing not to, but we just try to be listening. This has been a crazy year. Every time we play live, it feels diametrically opposed to how we played the last time. We’ve been playing with different people and different configurations, and just allowing those things to happen. At the same time, we’re consciously going back in time and playing with Dave Schramm again to just see what that would be like.

MJ: The band began as a duo, with other musicians coming in and out. How did James’ involvement change things?

IK: We thought we had a band, but when James joined, it was, “Oh, I see! This is a band!” Everything we do now, even though we had four records before he joined, traces back to when he joined. May I Sing With Me was the first record he plays on, but with Painful, I think that’s when we were really a band for the first time.

MJ: Did it feel natural when you began, James, or did you find it tough to integrate?

JM: There’s a Halloween episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes back in time. If he touches one thing and then flashes back to the present, everything is different. I didn’t want to do that in the band. I was a fan; I already thought they were doing great. It was like, “Don’t touch anything! Don’t ruin that band you like!” So I tried to find that spot where I felt, “I didn’t ruin things today? Let’s move it a little further.” I’m still toeing that line. But it was natural in a sense of our personalities. The first day we practiced together, we spent just as much time discussing Second City Television episodes as we did playing music.

MJ: Georgia and Ira, how do you keep your marriage from interfering with the business of the band?

IK: It’s pretty jumbled, and it is a challenge. But I feel like it has to be that way when you are passionate about your work—as opposed to waiting until five o’clock so you can do the things you really care about. Like James mentioned about SCTV, there is a gray line. Like, what is band practice? These things just work their way in. That goes back to being receptive, and being confident that the experiences you are having are going to find their way into what you’re doing. It’s not a matter of “We gotta learn that bridge today!” Things happen more formlessly.

MJ: How would you say your dynamic has changed since you first started playing?

IK: I think there’s less panic, and more acceptance that not everything is going to go the way that you thought it might. We are much more accepting of the days, or the weeks, when nothing we really liked happens. Or we’ll like something and try to play it again and find that it’s gone. I think there was a lot more anxiety about that in the past. Now it’s more like, “Oh well, that’s part of it.”

GH: We always are learning something, whether its, “Let’s not do that again,” or “How do we make that better?” Making music is really fun. Some of the other stuff can get to you, but I think we do a pretty good job of riding it out.

MJ: What other stuff?

JM: Everything but music!

GH: Everything else is terrible!

JM: There’s an actual physiological thing that happens to me on tour. There’s that moment where I sit in my seat and click the seatbelt, and five seconds later I fall asleep. There’s the excitement, and I guess anxiety, about what the shows will be like, but it’s overwhelmed by, “Thank God, here we go!” It’s letting go of all that other shit I had to do to get to this moment. It’s done—or at least it can’t touch me until we land.

MJ: So, to what do you attribute Yo La Tengo’s longevity?

IK: We managed to not ever be part of a movement. Even “indie” is a word we run from—that word is so amorphous. We’ve never been trendy, so consequently we’ve never fallen out of fashion. We didn’t have a hit, so we’ve never been locked into anything. As far as we know, maybe we are locked in somewhere from a few years ago in other peoples’ perceptions. Maybe we’re too stupid to know it.

GH: Or delusional? I think it’s probably a good thing.

MJ: Is there anything about your group temperament that allows you to keep going?

IK: We were never a group that thrived on volatility. We just don’t work well calling each other out, saying, “That sucks!” Some sports teams hate each other in the locker room and that’s what makes them great, but we’re not that team.

We did a show recently in Spain where the sound on stage was miserable and no one knew what to do about it. Georgia stopped a song that had begun, which is not the response anyone was expecting, even Georgia. There’s no question in my mind that if that had happened years ago, the band’s response and my response would have been so much worse. We just kept going. It didn’t derail the show in ways that it would have. It wasn’t even something I had to reflect on later.

JM: Mindfulness in action. When you’re in the audience and you’re seeing a band and shit’s falling apart, that’s thrilling! But when it’s happening to you, you think, “This sucks! I hope nobody is seeing this.”

IK: Even if we do look awful, it was a human moment. But it’s not always easy, seeing yourself.

GH: This trip we just did was fairly difficult. We were on this bill with a lot of bands, and it was very hard to connect to the audience. It’s a strange way to feel when you’re about to pour your heart out—to get on stage and feel like, “Does this matter to anyone?”

JM: I was reacting to the same feeling, that there are some people who aren’t watching the show. I thought, “Okay, so this is for us.” It was a really beautiful, emotional feeling—just joyful: I love doing this so much, and I hope you do too. I left with a smile. Or something close to a smile. I was very tired.

You can catch Yo La Tengo at their upcoming tour dates in the United States and Japan. They’ll also be appearing at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival and Big Ears Festival in early 2016.

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Yo La Tengo Is Here for the Long Haul

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Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

by VeraLNVsjwvas Posted on October 28, 2015

Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

By on 28 Oct 2015 6:33 amcommentsShare

As a general rule, climate hawks are not jumping for joy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a new trade deal between the U.S. and some Asian and Pacific nations. On Tuesday, in an interview with Democracy Now!, Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz gave them another reason to worry: He argued that certain provisions in the TPP would allow polluters to sue governments for setting carbon emission limits.

“This is a trade agreement that has all kinds of provisions intended to restrict regulations,” Stiglitz told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman.

As an example of the absurdity of these types of provisions, Stiglitz cited Philip Morris suing Uruguay in 2010 under a different treaty. Uruguay had implemented a regulation that required tobacco companies to append health warnings to cigarette cartons  — similar to what we have in the United States — and Philip Morris sued the country for a loss in expected profits. “In other words,” Stiglitz said, “the view is, they have the right to kill people, and if you want to take away that right, you have to pay them not to kill.”

The Columbia University economist warned that the TPP could spur similar litigation over climate regulations. “We know we’re going to need regulations to restrict the emissions of carbon,” argued Stiglitz. “But under these provisions, corporations can sue the government, including the American government, by the way, so all the governments in the TPP can be sued for the loss of profits as a result of the regulations that restrict their ability to emit carbon emissions that lead to global warming.”

Writing for Project Syndicate earlier this month, Stiglitz explained that corporate interests argue these types of provisions are “necessary to protect property rights where the rule of law and credible courts are lacking.” But he calls that argument “nonsense,” especially in the case of regulations formulated to target industries whose “profits are made from causing public harm.”

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Joseph Stiglitz: Under TPP, Polluters Could Sue U.S. For Setting Carbon Emissions Limits

, Democracy Now!.

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Trans-Pacific Partnership could undermine climate regulations, top economist warns

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Prosecutors Dealt a Setback in Trial of Rand Paul Aides

by LilianaCSSW Posted on October 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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An Iowa judge dealt a setback to prosecutors who have accused several Paul family political operatives of breaking campaign finance laws during Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. The judge ruled on Friday that all the charges filed against John Tate, a longtime Paul family operative who worked for both Ron and Rand Paul and for groups tied to the family’s political causes, should be dismissed. During the 2012 election, Tate was in charge of America’s Liberty PAC, a pro-Rand Paul super-PAC endorsed by the Kentucky senator. Several of the charges against Jesse Benton, who is married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter and also involved with America’s Liberty PAC, were also dropped. But Benton and a third Paul lieutenant, Dimitri Kesari, are still both scheduled to go to trial next week.

This case focuses on these operatives’ roles running the 2012 Ron Paul campaign and an apparent plan to pay an Iowa state senator to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul. The state senator, Kent Sorenson, initially denied there was a scheme to pay him to back Ron Paul, but eventually he admitted that he took money from the Paul campaign through a third party (to cover the campaign’s tracks). He pleaded guilty last year to federal campaign finance charges and is awaiting sentencing. On Friday, federal judge John Jarvey, dismissed all the charges against Tate and all but one of the charges against Benton, saying that in presenting charges to the grand jury, prosecutors improperly included accusations that Benton and Tate lied about their involvement in the case during meetings with investigators and prosecutors.

The judge’s decision was apparently based on complaints by Benton and Tate’s respective lawyers that the government convinced a grand jury to indict them by using statements the men made when they were under the impression that prosecutors wouldn’t use these remarks against them. According to court documents, last summer, before a grand jury was convened, the two men met, separately, with investigators and prosecutors in what is known as “proffer sessions”—meetings in which the subject of the interview is usually given some immunity and a promise the government won’t use what they tell investigators against them. The one instance in which statements made during a proffer session can be used to prosecute the interviewee is when the government prosecutes the person directly for making false statements to federal investigators. The charges against Tate and Benton that were dismissed today were related to conspiracy and campaign finance violations. The judge ruled that it was improper for prosecutors to bring up what Benton and Tate said in the proffer sessions when accusing them of those crimes.

Benton is still charged with making false statements to federal investigators and Kesari still faces six charges relating to the case, including conspiracy and campaign finance charges. Prosecutors also claim he tried to convince Sorenson to not cooperate with investigators.

Neither Benton nor Tate’s attorney responded to requests for comment, but Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said new charges may still be filed against Tate and Benton.

“The government is free to proceed to trial—and informed the court today that it will proceed to trial—on the remaining counts pertaining to Benton and Kesari,” Carr said. “The decision regarding the dismissed counts will be made at a later date post trial.”

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Prosecutors Dealt a Setback in Trial of Rand Paul Aides

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Elizabeth Warren Tells Stephen Colbert "the Game Is Rigged"

by JoanneTiller1 Posted on September 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday night, Stephen Colbert hosted yet another political star on his new CBS show, this time chatting with Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Colbert used the opportunity to push Warren about why she isn’t running for president, as seemingly every other politician with even the slightest bit of name recognition is giving it a go for 2016. “Are you sure you’re not running for president of the United States?” Colbert asked. “Have you checked the newspapers lately, because a lot of people have jumped in, you might have done it in your sleep.” Warren confirmed, yet again, that she’s happy in the Senate, fighting for the middle class because the “game is rigged.”

As usual, Warren wanted to talk less about electoral politics and instead squeeze in a bit of policy wonkery. The Massachusetts senator spent the bulk of the interview focused on one of her favorite topics: attacking trickle-down economics as conservative hocus-pocus that’s robbed the country of the resources needed to invest in the future. “One hundred percent of income growth in this country since the 1980s,” Warren said, “has gone to the top 10 percent, and that’s not only wrong, that is going to destroy our country unless we take our government back.”

Watch a brief clip of Warren’s interview below, or see the full episode here.

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Elizabeth Warren Tells Stephen Colbert "the Game Is Rigged"

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We’re killing off all the animals and they are making it really difficult for us to save them

by Dominik58K Posted on August 25, 2015

We’re killing off all the animals and they are making it really difficult for us to save them

By on 25 Aug 2015commentsShare

Take note, parents: The next time you take your kids to the zoo, if you really want to give them the full experience, be sure to tell them that behind all those cages full of depressed super happy animals, zoos have vials upon vials of animal sperm.

That’s right — vials of frozen elephant sperm might not be as exciting as Dumbo himself, but they’re just as important to wildlife conservation. As Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, discussed in her interview with Grist last year, scientists are hoping to use all that frozen goo to keep endangered species alive through artificial insemination. But as Wired reports, that’s easier said than done. Here’s the … rub (sorry):

Scientists, first off, simply don’t know how reproduction works for the vast majority of species. “We had to go back first to basic reproductive biology, because, of course, a cheetah is not a dairy cow,” says Pierre Comizzoli, a biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

Artificial insemination for cows has been successful because the livestock industry has poured millions of dollars and decades of research into studying them. But that’s just one species worth of research. With 6,264 endangered or critically endangered species on the IUCN Red List, scientists are spread thin trying to tease out the intricacies of their reproductive systems.

Giant panda sperm, for example, is quite “hardy,” Wired reports, while cheetah sperm is a bit more hit-or-miss. And even with good cheetah sperm, successful insemination isn’t always a sure thing because the females tend to have irregular hormone cycles. Cheetahs: They’re just like us!

The actual process of freezing all this animal goo, as Wired describes it, is pretty fascinating:

Once scientists have collected a semen sample (a logistically complex procedure that may involve anesthetizing the animal), the sperm needs to be frozen and, when the time comes, thawed. “It’s asking a lot of these cells,” says Budhan Pukazhenthi, a Smithsonian scientist who works with ungulates like zebras, antelopes, and deer. Scientists basically pickle the sperm cells with a cocktail of antifreeze chemicals, which involves a delicate dance between lowering the temperature of the sperm and introducing the solution to keep sharp ice crystals from forming within the cell. Reanimating the sample involves reversing the process while controlling for temperature and thawing rates. “It’s almost like cooking,” Pukazhenthi says.

So go forth, parents, babysitters, aunts, uncles, and anyone else heading to the zoo this weekend with youngsters in tow. Tell your little companions about the anesthetized animals, the sperm pickled in antifreeze, the artificial cheetah hormones, and the difference between elephant and panda jizz. With any luck, you’ll inspire a whole new generation of scientists who want the difficult, weird job of saving endangered species.

Source:

Why Frozen Sperm Can’t Save Earth’s Imperiled Species—Yet

, Wired.

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A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15


How to feed the world, with a little kelp from our friends (the oceans)Paul Dobbins’ farm needs no pesticides, fertilizer, land, or water — we just have to learn to love seaweed.


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Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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We’re killing off all the animals and they are making it really difficult for us to save them

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Trump Talks Policy!

by BudHockaday Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A “friend” of mine forced me to read the transcript of Sean Hannity’s interview with Donald Trump earlier this week, and it was fascinating in a train wreck kind of way. After a few minutes, Hannity said it was time to get serious and talk policy. Trump says great, let’s do it. So Hannity then tries manfully to get Trump to explain how Mexico is going to pay for a wall on the border. No dice:

HANNITY: You talked about Mexico. How quickly could you build the wall? How do you make them pay for the wall, as you said?

TRUMP: So easy. Will a politician be able to do it? Absolutely not….

HANNITY: Is it a tariff?

TRUMP: In China — listen to this. In China, the great China wall — I mean, you want to talk about a wall, that’s a serious wall, OK….

HANNITY: Sure.

TRUMP: So let’s say you’re talking about 1,000 miles versus 13,000. And then they say you can’t do it. It’s peanuts. It’s peanuts….

HANNITY: So through a tariff?

TRUMP: We’re not paying for it. Of course.

HANNITY: You want to do business, you’re going to help us with this.

TRUMP: Do you know how easy that is? They’ll probably just give us the money….And I’m saying, that’s like 100 percent. That’s not like 98 percent. Sean, it’s 100 percent they’re going to pay. And if they don’t pay, we’ll charge them a little tariff. It’ll be paid.

Trump gets five chances to explain his plan, and all we get is endless bluster. It’s easy! Hell, the Great Wall of China cost more! We’re not paying for it! The closest Trump comes to an answer—after prompting from Hannity—is some kind of tariff on Mexican goods, which of course is illegal under NAFTA. Trump would have to abrogate the treaty and get Congress to agree. In other words, maybe just a wee bit harder than he thinks.

(Oh, and Mexico’s president says the entire idea is a fantasy. “Of course it’s false,” a spokesman told Bloomberg News. “It reflects an enormous ignorance for what Mexico represents, and also the irresponsibility of the candidate who’s saying it.”)

The whole interview with Hannity is like this. The fascinating part is Trump’s ADHD. He just flatly can’t stay on topic, and I don’t think it’s fake. He constantly veers off into side topics: how far ahead he is in the polls; how everyone says he won the debate; how good a student he was at Wharton; how he’d send Carl Icahn to China; etc.

And then there’s the Hannity/Trump math. In Texas, there have been 642,000 crimes by illegal immigrants since 2008. Obamacare premiums are up more than 40 percent this year. Unemployment is at 40 percent. The whole 5.4 percent thing is just a government lie.

I don’t even really have a comment on this stuff. On a lot of subjects—his replacement for Obamacare, for example—it’s obvious he’s just making up his policy on the spot. Um, health accounts! And, um, no more state lines! And catastrophic insurance, sure! And preexisting conditions! You bet. And then….an ADHD segue into Obama playing golf, and Hannity finally gives up and switches topics.

I understand that the second part of the interview is even better. If I’m bored enough, I’ll take a look at it when the transcript goes up. Like I said, kind of fascinating if you’re the sort of person who likes to gawk at car wrecks on the side of the road.

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Trump Talks Policy!

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Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

by LeaMichalski Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Rachel Hills tells men that she wrote a book called The Sex Myth, she typically gets one response.

“Hah, sex isn’t a myth to me,” she recounts, deepening her voice in mimicry. “Yeah, you definitely get the eye roll from the men.”

But for Hills, a New York-based magazine writer, the way people talk about sex is plenty mystifying. While working as an opinion columnist in her native Australia nearly a decade ago, Hills began to notice how the media seemed obsessed with the idea that young people only wanted no-strings-attached sex—and lots of it. “What was being said about young people and sex very much did not fit my own life,” says Hills. “And I felt a sense of insecurity around that.”

She wasn’t alone, as she soon discovered by talking to hundreds of people about the topic. Over the next eight years, Hills became something of a “sexpert” through her columns for Cosmopolitan and Huffington Post. Her research culminated in her first book, The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality, which went on sale Tuesday from Simon & Schuster.

So what is the Sex Myth? For Hills, it’s the misconception that people need to be good in bed in order to be “adequate human beings.” “We internalize this idea of sex as something that is constantly available and that everyone is doing, and if you’re not doing it, there’s something wrong with you,” she explains. The book intertwines anecdotes, scientific research, and occasional moments of self-reflection to make the argument that people too often allow their sexuality to be defined by factors outside themselves.

Here are some of the other myths Hills debunks:

Myth No. 1: If you’re not having tons of sex as a young adult, there’s something wrong with you.
During her younger years, Hills writes, “sex was an unspoken assumption…I, on the other hand, had made it not only through high school a virgin, but through four years of college as well.” But research shows college students might be having less sex than we are led to believe. For example, the Online College Social Life Survey, a project out of New York University, found that 72 percent of college students “engage in some kind of hookup at least once by their senior year.” But forty percent said they hooked up with three or fewer people during their college career, and only a third of the students had engaged in intercourse during their most recent encounter. One in five students hadn’t hooked up during college at all.

Myth No. 2: Your desires aren’t normal.
Hills interviewed young adults from all types of backgrounds across Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The one thing they all had in common is that each felt that their sex life wasn’t “normal” in some way. Whether it was not reaching climax, not having sex frequently enough, expressing interests in kink, identifying as LGBTQ—no one was 100 percent sure that they were doing it “right.” Hills thinks the media plays a big role in fortifying this insecurity. Though progress has been made with shows such as Orange is the New Black and Transparent, the majority of mainstream entertainment portrays a very narrow spectrum of sexuality. “The ideal world that I’d like to see us move to, the liberated world, if you will, is the one where people aren’t made to feel shame about their sex lives, whether they’re being shamed for being considered too ‘slutty’ or ‘freaky’ or ‘weird’ or ‘prudish’ or too much of a ‘loser,'” Hills says. “So if you can remove that weight, then those decisions become less stigmatized.”

Myth No. 3: You’re not hot because Hollywood said so.
Hills points out that those who would be considered unattractive by Hollywood standards are also typically considered less sexual. Sex “serves as a proxy for our physical attractiveness and how well we fit in with the people around us,” Hills writes. The key to overcoming this attitude, she says, is introspection, and being much more critical of messaging about sex and how it applies to our own reality.

Myth No. 4: Men don’t worry about sex.
Perhaps the most surprising section of The Sex Myth is the chapter on male sexuality. Hills, a feminist, goes directly to where many feminist writers don’t—right into the hearts, rather than the hormones, of men. She writes sympathetically about unbidden erections and the pressure men face to perform sexually. “The absence of straight men from public conversations about sexuality also means that expectations of what men should do, be, and desire when it comes to sex often go unchallenged,” she writes. Hills argues that men are confined to a single definition of sexuality, which makes them “arguably more vulnerable to the Sex Myth than young women.”

The one weak spot in Hills’ analysis of male sexuality is her discussion of male sexual aggression in the context of rape culture. “The really ugly side of masculinity is a small part of it,” Hills writes. She adds that because rape is a well-covered topic at the moment, she didn’t feel compelled to dwell on it.

Myth No. 5: “Female sexual dysfunction” is all your fault.
How many jokes have been made about the female ability (and necessity) to fake an orgasm? Another aspect of the Sex Myth, as Hills describes it, is the pressure to turn pleasure into a performance. Hills thinks this impulse distracts from deeper issues. “If there’s anything ‘dysfunctional’ about our current approach to sex, it does not reside in our bodies,” she writes. But instead of drilling down on the nuances of female desire, companies would rather treat female sexual dysfunction as a problem that only medication can fix. As health journalist Ray Moynihan argued in a piece in the British Medical Journal, pharmaceutical companies are searching to “build markets for new medication” in the wake of Viagra’s financial success. Endless procedures and prescriptions have ensued, all of which lead to what one researcher describes as a “corporate-sponsored” disease.

So how best to avoid letting these myths creep into our consciousness and dictate our desires? Hills often turns to the antics of such comediennes as Amy Schumer and Tina Fey, who never shy away from sex as less-than-glamorous. “I feel like in making a joke about something, it creates permission for it,” she says. “The fact that you can say it makes it okay.”

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Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

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Jazz Heavyweight Terence Blanchard Won’t Turn a Blind Eye

by EnidChristmas Posted on August 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Terence Blanchard

Fifty-three year-old New Orleans-born trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard is a heavyweight among his musical peers, and not only for his passion as an amateur boxer. As a bandleader, he has released 20 albums over the past three decades. A prolific composer for film and television—he created the soundtracks for every Spike Lee film since Jungle Fever—Blanchard has a gift for constructing narrative and nuanced mood in his music.

His new album Breathless, released this past May, is his first with the electric E-Collective band and features vocal contributions from Maroon 5’s PJ Morton and Blanchard’s son JRei Oliver.

With the new band and the thematic connection to Eric Garner’s death, you’d think the album would be full of raw nerves and anger. But instead, Blanchard has created a suite of instrumentals, songs, and spoken word meditations that invite reflection on finding the strength and peace to heal and move forward. He challenges listeners to be “breathless from exerting your free will, breathless from doing good, breathless from blowing your own sweet solo.”

I spoke with Blanchard at the Jazz Standard in New York, and later on the phone from his home in New Orleans.

Mother Jones: Was your label, Blue Note, supportive about changing directions with this album?

Terence Blanchard: We just lost one of the greatest music executives of my time, Bruce Lundvall. The last time I saw him we were right here, taking a picture together. He was the type of dude that whenever I saw him, he always talked about music. It wasn’t ever, “I can do this for you, blah, blah, blah.” I always thought it would be great to be on a label with a guy like that because not only does he appreciate the music but I could also learn from him. When we finally got the chance to work together, he said, “I want you to be you.”

Now we have Don Was, who is very much like Bruce in that regard. When I first had the conversation with Don about the record he said, “Great, but bring it up to where you are, don’t dumb it down.” It was great to hear that.

MJ: Is composing for film a different process for you than making an album?

TB: When I first started it gave me headaches: I’d be working on a jazz thing then my brain would have to click out of that mode and then go work on the film. Wayne Shorter talks about your life being one continuous song with different variations, moods, textures, and color. That’s the way it is right now for me: Both inform each other in a way that I can see more clearly now. The film side has opened my eyes to story telling, context, and all of those issues. You’d think that working in film is limiting, but it’s actually liberating because it shows you that within the context of the story there are still a million permutations.

MJ: How did the topical side to Breathless evolve?

TB: Breathless didn’t start out to be a statement record, it started out as something we wanted to have fun with just playing music. But it’s hard with my background to turn a blind eye to what’s been happening.

MJ: Given that many of the people who have died in these police incidents have been young people, what did it mean to you to have your son involved in the record?

TB: It wasn’t something I thought about initially, but once it dawned on me, it made more sense. My son had had an incident of mistaken identity. A woman claimed that somebody had broken into her house, and she described the suspect as a black guy with dreads. My son had been walking by that house at that time. Her husband saw my son, followed him all the way to school and called 911. Seven patrol calls pulled up to the school. Seven. They handcuffed my son in class, walked him out and put him and put him in a patrol car. One of the cops there was a guy I grew up with, literally our back yards were connected. He saw my son sitting in the back of a patrol car and said, “I know this kid, he didn’t do this.” When they brought my son back to the woman’s house, her story fell apart. What got me was the seven patrol cars. That says a lot about the mentality going on in law enforcement. The thing I keep saying: It’s not going to stop until those police who are responsible go to jail.

MJ: My guess is that if the police prosecute their own, it undermines their power and control, and they’re afraid.

TB: I believe it to be true. That describes a whole host of problems with insecurity. You see it all the time.

I’ve been boxing for 20 years. When you start boxing and you get in the ring, the first thing you learn is to respect the person in front of you. That carries over into my daily life. I don’t care who it is or what they look like.

I’m going to tell you this, and this is probably going to get me in trouble, but I’ve seen some cops come to the boxing gym and not stay. Some of these dudes, they have an attitude problem; they come to the gym for the wrong reasons. And I think, if you have that problem here, what’s going to happen out on the street with your badge and a gun?

That’s the part we’re not dealing with. They are supposed to be the professionals. I’ve accepted that there are things that come with being a public figure as a musician. What’s crazy is the power they want to exert over everyday people when the side of the car says, “protect and serve.” To serve is something noble, something distinguished and honorable.

I have friends who are good cops but they are not speaking out. It’s creating this atmosphere of distrust that is truly dangerous. These police officers are human beings too, but they are subject to the same faults as everybody else, so they make the same assumptions as everybody else.

MJ: Your song “See Me As I Am” brings up the issue about perception and race.

TB: I hate using the term “as a black man,” but in my experience, I’ve gotten to the point when I meet people I feel that tension, I can see their minds change as I’m talking to them, I can see their thoughts about who I am change as we’re having a conversation. That’s normal in some ways for all interactions, but you call always tell when a first impression is mostly negative. Forget what you see on the news and television. Try to come and experience who I really am.

What gives me hope is when I look at my kids and their friends, I see that as an indication of where we’re going. My daughter was talking to me the other day about a girl friend of hers who is “gender mobile.” And I was like, “What’s that?” She says, “Sometimes she dresses like a boy, sometimes like a girl.” And she was cool with that. Race, ethnicity, sexual orientation— nothing matters to these kids, it’s beautiful.

MJ: Despite the real and justified anger about these incidents, the album seems to focus more on internal feelings and preservation of the self.

TB: At the end of the day that’s all we have: self-preservation. Our history has been to rely on our faith in times of trouble and distress. That’s been the place where we have found our salvation, and our rejuvenation.

MJ: As expressed in the song “Samadhi,” what does the practice of meditation do for you personally and creatively?

TB: It’s done so many things. It’s built up my awareness, it’s allowed me to understand that being selfless doesn’t mean powerless. That’s the reason I have “Confident Selflessness” on the album too, because you need to be confident in your aspirations, but you also need to be selfless in how you serve society and other people. It has allowed me to choose whether to be angry or not. Anger is not necessarily a reaction; it can be something that you choose to allow. When you start to see the bigger picture of things, you can respond accordingly. It’s brought me a lot of peace. It allows your mind to slow down, it allows your thoughts to slow down, and it allows your soul to strengthen itself. One of the things I chant for is peace in this country.

MJ: Is there anything else to staying happy and healthy as a musician?

TB: A lot of it is just peace and solitude. You need that to rejuvenate yourself and rebuild your brain and your spirit. People don’t understand how much energy it takes to do this, not just physically but mentally. I did a gig with Ron Carter and on the way back to the hotel, the driver was playing some music. Ron said, “Excuse me, could you please just turn that off? I’ve been playing music all night and I have to resolve all this shit that I played in my mind.” I get his point.

Actually, do you know what most musicians used to do? They’ll never admit it, but before the Internet—it was soap operas. There were a lot of them, and they would have discussions about this stuff on the road. I wasn’t into them but I would think to myself, “Boy if they could see me now, with these dudes talking about The Young and the Restless!”

MJ: Are you going to name names?

TB: Naww, I can’t do that! For me it used to be Jerry Springer, because when you watch Jerry Springer you immediately forget about whatever you were doing.

This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity.

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Jazz Heavyweight Terence Blanchard Won’t Turn a Blind Eye

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