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Pope Francis Forcefully Urges America to Save the Planet

by Myrna Posted on September 23, 2015

Watch the pope’s powerful speech at the White House this morning. President Obama welcomed Pope Francis to the White House Wednesday morning to loud cheers from thousands gathered to greet the leader of the Catholic church—in a city that has virtually shut down for the historic event. The ceremony marks the first time that Pope Francis has visited the United States and kicks off a much anticipated three-city tour that includes Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. During his first address in the United States, Francis pulled no punches when talking about one of the defining issues of his leadership, calling on Americans to protect our “common home” and act on climate change with a sense of urgency—a stance that many Republicans have criticized. “It seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation,” Francis said, in slow but forceful English. “We know by faith that the Creator does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home.” He is scheduled to speak before Congress on Thursday, where he is expected bring his climate agenda directly to lawmakers. President Obama also took the opportunity to praise Francis’s stance on climate change, telling the pope: “you remind us that we have a sacred obligation to protect our planet—God’s magnificent gift to us.” Watch below: Master image of Pope Francis and Obama: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Link:  Pope Francis Forcefully Urges America to Save the Planet ; ; ;

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Pope Francis Forcefully Urges America to Save the Planet

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Sorry, Conservatives: You Deserve Donald Trump

by ShariGottschalk Posted on September 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Jonah Goldberg, in an epic lament about the trumpenproletariat’s crush on Donald Trump and the willingness of mainstream conservatives to pander to it:

Every principle used to defend Trump is subjective, graded on a curve. Trump is like a cat trained to piss in a human toilet. It’s amazing! It’s remarkable! Yes, yes, it is: for a cat. But we don’t judge humans by the same standard.

I think this is unfair to cats who learn to piss in the toilet. At least that’s a useful skill, and at least they don’t spend all their free time bragging about it. Still, fair point.

On a related note, I continue to be impressed at the number of conservatives who are aghast not at Trump per se, but at the fact that the conservative base is so enamored of him. Most conservative support of Trump is “venting and resentment pretending to be some kind of higher argument,” Goldberg says. And then: “I am tempted to believe that Donald Trump’s biggest fans are not to be relied upon in the conservative cause.” Ya think?

But surely Goldberg understands that this is the right-wing base that he and his colleagues have built? I don’t expect any conservative writer to acknowledge this in public, but surely in the occasional dark night of the soul they understand what they’ve done? For years they’ve supported the worst know-nothing bombast of Drudge and Limbaugh, the casual reality distortion of Fox News, and the resentment-based appeals of people like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. And they’ve turned a blind eye to even worse: birthers, Agenda 21 lunacy, Cliven Bundy’s army, and much, much more. It was handy at the time, and helped win a few elections. But now the outrage-based mob they’ve nurtured has come back to haunt them—and unsurprisingly, it turns out not to care all that much about the debating-hall nuances of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk. They just want to kick out the wetbacks and get back at those smug liberals who make fun of them.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. But if you want to survive, you’d better at least understand that once forged, a sword can be wielded by anyone strong enough to grab it. You might not like it when your army decides to follow, but you’re the one who taught them to follow the shiny object without worrying too much about whose hand is on the hilt, aren’t you?

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Sorry, Conservatives: You Deserve Donald Trump

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A Republican’s Guide to Gotcha Questions

by Danny81R8157 Posted on September 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are “gotcha” questions unfair? It depends. I’m personally averse to Jeopardy-style factual quizzes, but not because it’s out of line to probe presidential candidates about what they know. Rather, it’s the form of the question itself. It treats presidential candidates like schoolchildren being quizzed in front of the class. It’s inherently demeaning for any self-respecting adult—and for politicians too.

That said, there are gotchas and there are gotchas, and some are worse than others. Here’s a taxonomy:

SEVERE: “Can you name the president of Chechnya? The president of Taiwan? The general who is in charge of Pakistan? The prime minister of India?” Only an asshole asks questions like this.

Recommended answer: “Oh, go fuck yourself.”

HIGH: “Have you ever used cocaine?” This is moderately nasty, but there are dangers to a straightforward refusal to respond. Humor is worth a try.

Recommended answer: “Once, but only accidentally when I picked up a friend at Mena airport in the 90s and left the car door open.”

ELEVATED: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” This is a double-edged sword. Answer it properly and you sound like you actually know something about Islam. Waffle and you sound stupid. Your best bet is to turn it into an attack.

Recommended answer: “ISIS terrorists are Sunni. President Obama is a Shiite. That’s why he hates those guys so much. It all goes back to the seventh-century, when Obama’s 18th cousin 43 times removed insisted that someone from Mohammad’s family should take up the leadership of the Muslim Ummah.”

GUARDED: “What’s your favorite Bible verse?” This is basically a hanging curve. If you ever went to Sunday School, you shouldn’t have any trouble hitting it out of the park.

Recommended answer: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. I try to live up to this every single day. There will be no appeasement of America’s enemies on my watch.”

LOW: “What newspapers and magazines do you regularly read?” This is pretty much the opposite of a gotcha. It’s the human interest version of “hello,” a way of easing into an interview with a friendly little softball.

Recommended answer: “All the usual suspects. The Times, the Post, Human Events, and the Journal of Econometrics. Did you see their paper last month critiquing the Fed’s easy money policies by applying a Tobit regression to a fixed-effects nonparametric model with time-aggregated panel data? It was killer.”

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A Republican’s Guide to Gotcha Questions

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Friday Cat Blogging – 4 September 2015

by CarmonKTRqhvjz Posted on September 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Like Hillary Clinton, we’ve been watching a lot of HGTV lately. This has inspired Marian to create a long list of renovation projects she’d like to do. It’s inspired me to wonder if literally everyone in the world wants an open-concept floor plan these days.

And one other thing: It’s also made it clear that most interior designers on TV are dog people. How do I know? Because they seem to be very fond of rectangular sinks in bathrooms. However, as we more refined types know, this is entirely unacceptable. Ovals fit the requirements of a properly outfitted household much better.

BONUS FEATURE IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: The prefecture of Hiroshima, in the cat-crazy country of Japan, has created the first cat’s-eye version of Google Street View. Check it out.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 4 September 2015

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In the Contest for Worst Automobile-Driving Species, the Winner is Homo Sapiens

by ElsieGiltner Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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A reader tells me this story seems right up my alley:

Google, a leader in efforts to create driverless cars, has run into an odd safety conundrum: humans.

Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.

….Dmitri Dolgov, head of software for Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, said that one thing he had learned from the project was that human drivers needed to be “less idiotic.”

That’s the spirit! And when Skynet takes over, humans will finally cease to be such a nuisance. Driverless car nirvana will be at hand.

Ahem. In reality, of course, this whole story is sort of silly. Of course the biggest problem with driverless cars is humans. What else would it be? Plop a few thousand driverless cars into an empty city and they’d get along swimmingly. No one is unaware of this, least of all Google.

But I suppose from Google’s perspective, stories like this are useful as ways to calm fears about driverless cars. And there is a good point to be made about that: driverless cars don’t have to be perfect to be useful. They just have to be at least as good as humans. So while the fact that humans are generally idiotic drivers might be a short-term annoyance, in the long run it’s a huge bonus for Google. They don’t have to beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, just the local high school JV team.

This, by the way, is why I’m so generally bullish on artificial intelligence. It’s not because I have such a high opinion of computers, but because I have such a low opinion of humans. We really are just overclocked chimpanzees who have convinced ourselves that our weird jumble of largely Pavlovian behaviors—punctuated by regrettably rare dollops of intelligence—is deeply ineffable and therefore resistant to true understanding. Why do we believe this? Primarily for the amusingly oxymoronic reason that we aren’t smart enough to understand our own brains. The silicon crowd should be able to do better before long.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, I’m a lovely driver. It’s all you other folks who are causing so many problems.

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In the Contest for Worst Automobile-Driving Species, the Winner is Homo Sapiens

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Sorry, I Don’t Know Why Murder Rates Are Up In a Bunch of Big Cities

by TKICheriugkxd Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve gotten enough requests to comment on this piece from the New York Times that I guess I’d better do so:

Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.

More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.

Law enforcement experts say disparate factors are at play in different cities, though no one is claiming to know for sure why murder rates are climbing. Some officials say intense national scrutiny of the use of force by the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals, though many experts dispute that theory.

The reason I haven’t said anything about this until now is that I had nothing to say. I have no more idea what’s driving this increase than anyone else.

But what about lead? Here’s the problem: gasoline lead explains one thing and one thing only. And that thing is the huge violent crime wave of 1960-1990 followed by the equally huge drop of 1990-2010. But that’s over. What we’re left with now is the baseline level of violent crime, which obviously wouldn’t be zero even if there were no lead in the environment at all. And the causes of this baseline level of violent crime are all the usual suspects: poverty, race, drugs, policing, guns, demographics, and so forth. A more detailed explanation is here. At this point, lead is a very small contributor to the crime level.

It’s also worth pointing out that crime figures, and murder figures in particular, are extremely noisy. Lead explains long-term shifts. It doesn’t explain short-term spikes or (in most cases) differences from one city to another. The current increase in murder rates could be due to lots of things, or it could just be the usual noise in the numbers. Maybe they’ll go right back down next year.

But I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that lead is playing no particular role in this, either good or bad.

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Sorry, I Don’t Know Why Murder Rates Are Up In a Bunch of Big Cities

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Let Us Now Praise Passionate Politics

by ShadRix5723 Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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German Lopez notes the reaction in some quarters to the recent shooting of a Texas deputy sheriff:

Despite any solid leads and facts about the motives in the shooting of 10-year deputy veteran Darren Goforth, some conservative media outlets and local law enforcement officials have already settled on the real culprit: Black Lives Matter.

….Fox News’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck later wondered aloud on air why Black Lives Matter isn’t considered a “hate group.” Bill O’Reilly was more blunt, concluding the movement was indeed a “hate group.”

….It’s not just Fox News — other reports painted narratives that put Black Lives Matter and police as inherently in conflict. A CNN report, for instance, described Black Lives Matter’s advocacy as “anti-police rhetoric.” What does it say about American society that advocating for black lives and ending racial disparities in the criminal justice system would qualify not as pro-equality but as anti-police?

This is hardly a surprise. Nor is it limited to conservatives. Liberals frequently fault anti-abortion rhetoric when someone kills an abortion clinic worker or anti-government rhetoric when someone shoots up an IRS office.

That won’t stop, but it should. People and groups have to be free to condemn abortion or police misconduct or anything else—sometimes soberly, sometimes not. And it’s inevitable that this will occasionally inspire a maniac somewhere to resort to violence. There’s really no way around this. It’s obviously something for any decent person to keep in mind, but it doesn’t make passionate politics culpable for the ills of the world. We can’t allow the limits of our political spirit to be routinely dictated by the worst imaginable consequences.

This is no apology for obviously incendiary speech. If you get on your soapbox and tell your followers to kill the pigs or murder the child murderers, then you bear a share of blame for what happens next. That’s both common sense and legal reality.

But we also need common sense toward speech that’s less immediately incendiary but still fiery or angry—or both. This is where change, liberal and conservative alike, comes from. It’s sadly inevitable that in a country of 300 million, even the minuscule fraction that fears change enough to go on a killing rampage amounts to a lot of people. But it’s neither a good reason to rein in our political vigor nor a good reason to blame passionate engagement in politics for every related tragedy. That way lies atrophy and rot.

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Let Us Now Praise Passionate Politics

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Science Marches On: We Now Have a Yard Sale That Runs Backward In Time

by ScarletCawthorn Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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A sentence to ponder:

The world’s longest yard sale runs for nearly 700 miles along a mostly vertical line connecting Alabama and Michigan, from the first Thursday in August through the first Sunday.

But what if the first Sunday comes before the first Thursday? Do they cancel the sale that year? Does it run backward through time? I demand answers.

(Via Tyler Cowen.)

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Science Marches On: We Now Have a Yard Sale That Runs Backward In Time

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September Is Here! Time for Republicans to Get … Um … Something About Donald Trump.

by LillieClifford6 Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s September! Hooray! The kids are back in school and Donald Trump’s reign over the silly season will soon be coming to an end. Finally, we can start to get serious about choosing our next presi—

Wait. WTF? Trumpmentum’s sagging fortunes have turned around? He’s now even further in the lead? Well crap.

The Republican field really needs to get its act together. They can’t go on being afraid of him because he’s “tapping into something real,” or whatever the latest excuse is. It’s time for some nuclear-level attack ads. The problem, I assume, is that everybody in the race wants someone else to waste their money attacking Trump, so they’re all left in a weird kind of prisoner’s dilemma where no one is willing to go first. They better figure out soon that this is a losing strategy.

Oh well. The higher they go, the farther they fall. Amirite?

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September Is Here! Time for Republicans to Get … Um … Something About Donald Trump.

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Lone Gay Marriage Holdout Acting "Under the Authority of God"

by AstridTerrill62 Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sigh.

A county clerk in Kentucky who objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds denied licenses to gay couples on Tuesday, just hours after the Supreme Court refused to support her position.

In a raucous scene in the little town of Morehead, two-same-sex couples walked into the Rowan County Courthouse, trailed by television cameras and chanting protesters on both sides of the issue, only to be told by the county clerk, Kim Davis, that she was denying them marriage licenses “under the authority of God.”

The optimist in me says that if the biggest backlash to the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision is one clerk in a tiny town in Kentucky, then we’ve gotten off pretty easy. And really, the more I think about it, that really does seem like the main takeaway from this.

But it’s obvious that the endgame here is for Kim Davis to be fired, or tossed in jail for contempt. The Supreme Court itself has ordered her to issue licenses, so she has no further legal recourse. Only recourse to God.

I’m now curious to see what the Republican field will make of this. On the one hand, most of them are treating the primary contest as a zero-sum race to see who can move furthest to the right. On the other hand, do they really want to get on the wrong side of gay marriage and immigration? On the third hand, there’s the whole rule of law thing. And on the fourth hand, Donald Trump is not an anti-gay warrior. He’s the guy everyone is responding to, so maybe that means this will stay low key.

The Huckabees and Carsons of the world will surely support Davis. The rest of the field….probably not. That’s my guess. Then again, if video of Davis being hauled off to the county pen ends up on a 24/7 loop on Fox News, who knows? Defying the will of a small groups of pissed off base voters is not something the Republican field is exactly famous for.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent confirms my sense that holdouts like Davis are very rare. “In the seven southern states where the backlash might have been expected to be fiercest, only one — Alabama — still has multiple counties that are holding out. One other — Kentucky — has only two remaining counties holding out.” The national campaign director for Freedom to Marry says that, all things considered, “things are going exceedingly smoothly.”

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Lone Gay Marriage Holdout Acting "Under the Authority of God"

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