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China Is Absolutely Destroying the US on Clean Energy

by NormanCombs79 Posted on November 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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When world leaders convene on Monday in Paris for two weeks of high-stakes climate negotiations, one of the top items on the agenda will be how developing nations should prepare for and help to slow global warming. Opponents to President Barack Obama’s climate agenda, such as GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio, like to argue that anything the United States does to curb greenhouse gas emissions will be pointless because countries like India and China aren’t doing the same.

But new data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that this argument is just hot air: For the first time ever, over the last year the majority of global investment in clean energy projects was spent in developing countries. In fact, clean energy investment in China alone outpaced that in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France combined, BNEF found. Across 55 major non-OECD countries, including India, Brazil, China, and Kenya, clean energy investment reached $126 billion in 2014, a record high and 39 percent higher than 2013 levels.

The chart below shows how that level of investment is opening up a market for wind, solar, and other clean energy projects in non-OECD countries that is now larger than the market in the traditional strongholds of the United States and Europe. In other words, the very countries Rubio likes to malign as laggards are actually leading the charge.

BNEF

That trend is likely to continue for decades to come, BNEF found. Check out their projection for growth through 2040:

BNEF

These numbers add up to a big deal for the climate, because they show that countries in Africa and Southeast Asia that still lack reliable electricity for millions of people are solving that problem, and growing their economies, without relying on dirty fossil fuels. China, to be clear, is still the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and it doesn’t plan to peak its emissions until 2030. But its early commitment to clean energy means it can continue its rapid rate of growth with far less pollution than it would produce otherwise.

The BNEF report is just the most recent good sign for the clean energy business. Big corporations in the United States are signing contracts for a record amount of clean energy for their data centers, warehouses, and other facilities. And the Paris talks are likely to send a jolt through the industry, as countries around the world redouble their commitments to get more of their power from renewable sources.

Stay tuned for more news on this front as the talks unfold over the coming weeks.

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China Is Absolutely Destroying the US on Clean Energy

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Marco Rubio Bravely Rules Out Negotiation With ISIS That No One Has Ever Proposed

by RXGAdam98611926 Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Marco Rubio has aired his first TV ad, and I suppose it’s no surprise that we’ve already seen it. The whole thing is his schtick about the fight against ISIS being a civilizational struggle etc. etc. Here it is:

Once again, Rubio offers up his odd bit about ISIS hating us because we let women drive. But forbidding women to drive is actually one of the few odious things that ISIS doesn’t do. It’s our great and good friend Saudi Arabia that has a problem with women drivers. I’m pretty sure Rubio has never said a bad word about the Kingdom, so it seems a little odd to obsess about this when he’s got such a huge panoply of other horrific stuff to choose from (we don’t behead heretics, we don’t sanction slavery, and so forth).

At the end Rubio gravely intones that “there can be no arrangement or negotiation.” Where did that come from? Rubio would just as soon not let anyone know this, but the Obama administration is pretty firmly at war with ISIS. We’re bombing them. We’re taking territory from them. We’re doing out best to wipe out their financial infrastructure. Obama’s official policy is to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. Nobody—literally nobody—has ever suggested negotiating with them.

But I suppose none of that matters. Mostly, this is just Rubio trying his best to use dramatic lighting and a grave tone to avoid looking like he’s 22, which is probably his greatest drawback in the presidential race. It’s unfair, but with that baby face and breakneck speaking style that sounds like he’s still on the college debating team, he just doesn’t look old enough to be the leader of the free world. He seems more like a well-regarded up-and-comer, not the guy who already upped and came.

Does the ad work? It seems a little to strained to me, but I’m hardly his target audience. We’ll see.

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Marco Rubio Bravely Rules Out Negotiation With ISIS That No One Has Ever Proposed

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This Map Shows Who Wants To Move To Your Country

by CleoYanezbx Posted on September 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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As the migration crisis in Europe continues to unfold, the images of dead children, crowded train platforms, and people trying not to be sent to migrant camps have triggered worldwide concern. Those jammed in Hungarian train stations or washing up on the shores of Greece each have very specific stories, but they are also a part of a long history of displacement. As long as there has been starvation and war, there has been migration to countries of peace and economic opportunity.

What is new, however, is the ability to look for information about a potential destination before going there. And all over the world, people are clicking on Google searches to learn more about lands of opportunity, especially the prosperous G-8 countries—France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, Canada, and Russia.

In the map below, the Google News Lab has come up with a way to chart comparative levels of curiosity about the G-8 countries from others all over the world. For instance:

And here is the interest of Syrians in France:

Check out Google’s full map below:

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This Map Shows Who Wants To Move To Your Country

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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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Silicon Valley Made a Bunch of Dudes Billionaires, But It’s Making You Poorer

by Lanette25f Posted on July 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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First the tech industry made your life easier with iPhones, tablets, and smart-everything. But is it also making it harder for you to get ahead?

A recent study on global income inequality by the International Monetary Fund identifies technological change as a top factor driving the split between rich and poor worldwide. Specifically, the study’s authors found that the growth of technology accounts for nearly one-third of the widening gap between the top 10 percent and bottom 90 percent over the past quarter century. Other factors include the globalization of trade and finance.

Here’s how tech has contributed to widening the gap: It’s eliminated jobs by automating tasks, and it’s driven up the “skill premium,” meaning jobs that require skills like coding pay more lucratively than traditional blue-collar jobs. But even tech workers aren’t safe, because their industry’s needs evolve so quickly that they may be made obsolete by the very advancements they’re working toward. In the end, the jobs that pay the most are only for those who can keep up with the changing times, and those who can afford the required education to get a position in the first place.

The study notes that technological change has contributed most to rising income inequality in the 39 OECD countries that make up 80 percent of global trade and investment. It finds that inequality has grown the most in the United States and the United Kingdom, even as poverty in emerging economies has decreased.

Education hasn’t alleviated income inequality as much as it could, according to the study. Despite a notable rise in highly-educated workers, the wage gap between high- and low-skilled workers remains. The researchers suggest that education is a viable solution only if governments invest it and make it affordable. “What we find really is that raising income shares of the rich doesn’t trickle down,” says Era Dabla-Norris, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the International Monetary Fund. “And raising the income shares of the poor and middle class is actually good for growth.”

And while other studies have found links between housing costs and venture capital investment, high levels of innovation, high concentrations of high-tech industry and venture capital startups (looking at you, San Francisco), the issue of inequality is a complex one. “There are some common drivers across the world, but the drivers vary,” Dabla-Norris says. “Policies to alleviate inequality have to be country-specific; there is no one-size-fits-all.”

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Silicon Valley Made a Bunch of Dudes Billionaires, But It’s Making You Poorer

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This Major Newspaper Just Declared War on Fossil Fuels

by Myrna Posted on March 20, 2015

Inside the Guardian’s decision to embrace climate activism. Jonathan Nicholson/ZUMA After 20 years at the helm of one of the United Kingdom’s most influential newspapers, Alan Rusbridger is about to step down as editor of the Guardian. He’s not going quietly: In an op-ed a couple weeks ago, Rusbridger pledged to use his waning weeks to launch a full-out war on climate change: So, in the time left to me as editor, I thought I would try to harness the Guardian’s best resources to describe what is happening…For the purposes of our coming coverage, we will assume that the scientific consensus about man-made climate change and its likely effects is overwhelming. We will leave the sceptics and deniers to waste their time challenging the science. The mainstream argument has moved on to the politics and economics… We will look at who is getting the subsidies and who is doing the lobbying. We will name the worst polluters and find out who still funds them. We will urge enlightened trusts, investment specialists, universities, pension funds and businesses to take their money away from the companies posing the biggest risk to us. And, because people are rightly bound to ask, we will report on how the Guardian Media Group itself is getting to grips with the issues. The Guardian, a Climate Desk partner, is no stranger to global warming reporting. It was the first daily paper in the UK to institute a dedicated section for environment coverage. The paper has extensively covered international climate negotiations, fracking on both sides of the Atlantic, and the latest climate science, while also pouring resources into lush interactive web features. But its new initiative promises to go even further. The series kicked off with a pair of excerpts from Harvard science historian Naomi Klein’s recent book on the tension between capitalism and the climate crisis. Over the next few months it will include investigative features, daily news stories, videos and podcasts, and even original artwork and poetry. The pieces will appear not just on the paper’s environment pages, but across all sections, from business and tech to lifestyle and the arts. The overarching idea is that from now until Rusbridger’s departure in June, any climate story that any reporter has had kicking around but has never had time to tackle will get priority treatment. But the centerpiece is all about the penultimate sentence in the excerpt above: “We will urge…” This week the Guardian kicked off a petition calling on the world’s two largest charitable organizations, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, to divest their financial holdings from the world’s 200 top fossil fuel companies. As of Thursday afternoon, the petition had gathered over 94,000 signatures and earned the support of the country’s energy minister. If that sounds a lot like straight-up activism, that’s because it is. Rusbridger proposed the petition a few months ago at a meeting that included a who’s-who of the paper’s top editors, designers, and website coders, said James Randerson, an assistant national news editor who handles climate reporting. “There were some voices who questioned whether a campaign was the best use of the Guardian‘s voice,” Randerson said, “because the Guardian is about reporting and uncovering things that people can use in advancing an agenda.” But Rusbridger’s argument, Randerson said, was: “We’ve tried to do that for quite a while, and we needed to do something that had a bit more cut-through. We felt that it was time to take that step.” The idea of a newspaper undertaking an openly activist campaign straight from the playbook of Greenpeace or the Sierra Club might seem strange to American audiences, who are accustomed to news outlets at least purporting to adhere to some degree of journalistic objectivity. But in the UK, newspapers taking a step across the line between news and activism is, well, less newsworthy. In 2014 the Guardian waged a similar campaign against female genital mutilation. Prior to the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, the Guardian convinced 56 newspapers from around the globe to publish a front-page editorial calling for climate action. Randerson also characterized the paper’s extensive reporting on Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency as a kind of unofficial campaign against state surveillance. And the Times of London has an ongoing campaign to promote safety for urban cyclists, inspired by an accident that nearly killed one of its reporters. Randerson said the campaign won’t dampen the editorial rigor applied to reporting, editing, and fact-checking news stories. Is it time for the Washington Post and the New York Times to launch climate petitions of their own? Randerson wouldn’t say, but he did argue that especially in the United States, “the media have not done a service to their readers in explaining what’s really at stake here.” Now we get a chance to see if a more direct approach does the trick. View the original here: This Major Newspaper Just Declared War on Fossil Fuels

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This Major Newspaper Just Declared War on Fossil Fuels

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Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

by JBWFlynnmh Posted on October 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a stunning chart for you. It comes from a paper by a team of Swedish researchers, and it shows the relationship between earnings and weight among men. As you can see, adult earnings reach a peak around a BMI of 23—smack in the middle of the normal range—and then steadily decline as you get more overweight. But here’s the kicker:

In particular, we contribute to the existing literature by showing that there is a large labor market weight-related penalty also for males, but only for those who were already overweight or obese in adolescence. We replicated this pattern using additional data sets from the United Kingdom and the United States, where the results were strikingly similar. The UK and U.S. estimates also confirm that the penalty is unique to those who were overweight or obese early in life.

The earnings penalty for overweight (and underweight!) men isn’t due to simple discrimination. Men who become overweight as adults face no special career penalty. It’s only a problem for men who become overweight as teenagers. The Economist summarizes the paper’s conclusions:

At first glance, a sceptic might be unconvinced by the results. After all, within countries the poorest people tend to be the fattest….But the authors get around this problem by mainly focusing on brothers….They also include important family characteristics like the parents’ income. All this statistical trickery allows the economists to isolate the effect of obesity on earnings.

So what does explain the “obesity penalty”? They reckon that discrimination in the labour market is not that important. Neither is health. Instead they emphasise what psychologists call “noncognitive factors”—motivation, popularity and the like. Having well-developed noncognitive factors is associated with success in the labour market. The authors argue that obese children pick up fewer noncognitive skills—they are less likely, say, to be members of sports teams or they may face discrimination from teachers.

In other words, social ostracism of both underweight and overweight teenagers produces lower cognitive skills and lower noncognitive (i.e., social) skills, and this in turn leads to lower earnings as adults. It may seem like harmless teenage clique behavior, but it has real consequences.

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Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

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Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

by HelaineM45 Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Vaccine denial is dangerous. We know this for many reasons, but just consider one of them: In California in 2010, 10 children died in a whooping cough outbreak that was later linked, in part, to the presence of 39 separate clusters of unvaccinated children in the state. It’s that simple: When too many children go unvaccinated, vaccine-preventable diseases spread more easily, and sometimes children die. Nonetheless, as scientifically unfounded fears about childhood vaccines causing autism have proliferated over the past decade or more, a minority of parents are turning to “personal belief exemptions,” so-called “alternative vaccine schedules,” and other ways to dodge or delay vaccinating their kids.

So as a rational person, you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there’s a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse. The paper tested the effectiveness of four separate pro-vaccine messages, three of which were based very closely on how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself talks about vaccines. The results can only be called grim: Not a single one of the messages was successful when it came to increasing parents’ professed intent to vaccinate their children. And in several cases the messages actually backfired, either increasing the ill-founded belief that vaccines cause autism or even, in one case, apparently reducing parents’ intent to vaccinate.

Click here for more on vaccine-dodging parents.

The study, by political scientist Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College* and three colleagues, adds to a large body of frustrating research on how hard it is to correct false information and get people to accept indisputable facts. Nyhan and one of his coauthors, Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, are actually the coauthors of a much discussed previous study showing that when politically conservative test subjects read a fake newspaper article containing a quotation of George W. Bush asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, followed by a factual correction stating that this was not actually true, they believed Bush’s falsehood more strongly afterwards—an outcome that Nyhan and Reifler dubbed a “backfire effect.”

Unfortunately, the vaccine issue is prime terrain for such biased and motivated reasoning; recent research even suggests that a conspiratorial, paranoid mindset prevails among some vaccine rejectionists. To try to figure out how to persuade them, in the new study researchers surveyed a representative sample of 1,759 Americans with at least one child living in their home. A first phase of the study determined their beliefs about vaccines; then, in a follow-up, respondents were asked to consider one of four messages (or a control message) about vaccine effectiveness and the importance of kids getting the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.

The first message, dubbed “Autism correction,” was a factual, science-heavy correction of false claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism, assuring parents that the vaccine is “safe and effective” and citing multiple studies that disprove claims of an autism link. The second message, dubbed “Disease risks,” simply listed the many risks of contracting the measles, the mumps, or rubella, describing the nasty complications that can come with these diseases. The third message, dubbed “Disease narrative,” told a “true story” about a 10-month-old whose temperature shot up to a terrifying 106 degrees after he contracted measles from another child in a pediatrician’s waiting room.

Child with measles CDC/llinois Department of Public Health

All three of these messages are closely based on messages (here, here, and here) that appear on the CDC website. And then there was a final message that was not directly based on CDC communications, dubbed “Disease images.” In this case, as a way of emphasizing the importance of vaccines, test subjects were asked to examine three fairly disturbing images of children afflicted with measles, mumps, and rubella. One of those images used is at right.

The results showed that by far, the least successful messages were “Disease narrative” and “Disease images.” Hearing the frightening narrative actually increased respondents’ likelihood of thinking that getting the MMR vaccine will cause serious side effects, from 7.7 percent to 13.8 percent. Similarly, looking at the disturbing images increased test subjects’ belief that vaccines cause autism. In other words, both of these messages backfired.

Why did that happen? Dartmouth’s Nyhan isn’t sure, but he comments that “if people read about or see sick children, it may be easier to imagine other kinds of health risks to children, including possibly side effects of vaccines that are actually quite rare.” (When it comes to side effects, Nyhan is referring not to autism but to the small minority of cases in which vaccines cause adverse reactions.)

The two more straightforward text-only messages, “Austism correction” and “Disease risks,” had more mixed effects. “Disease risks” didn’t cause any harm, but it didn’t really produce any benefits either.

As for “Autism correction,” it actually worked, among survey respondents as a whole, to somewhat reduce belief in the falsehood that vaccines cause autism. But at the same time, the message had an unexpected negative effect, decreasing the percentage of parents saying that they would be likely to vaccinate their children.

Looking more closely, the researchers found that this occurred because of a strong backfire effect among the minority of test subjects who were the most distrustful of vaccines. In this group, the likelihood of saying they would give their kids the MMR vaccine decreased to 45 percent (versus 70 percent in the control group) after they received factual, scientific information debunking the vaccines-autism link. Indeed, the study therefore concluded that “no intervention increased intent to vaccinate among parents who are the least favorable toward vaccines.”

Nyhan carefully emphasizes that the study cannot say anything about the effectiveness of other possible messages beyond the ones that were tested. So there may be winners out there that simply weren’t in the experiment—although as Nyhan added, “I don’t have a good candidate.” In any event, given results like these, any new messages ought to be tested as well.

“I don’t think our results imply that they shouldn’t communicate why vaccines are a good idea,” adds Nyhan. “But they do suggest that we should be more careful to test the messages that we use, and to question the intuition that countering misinformation is likely to be the most effective strategy.”

Finally, Nyhan adds that in order to protect public health by encouraging widespread vaccinations, public communication efforts aren’t the only tools at our disposal. “Other policy measures might be more effective,” he notes. For instance, recently we reported on how easy it is for parents to dodge getting their kids vaccinated in some states; in some cases, it requires little more than a onetime signature on a form. Tightening these policies might be considerably more helpful than trying to win hearts and minds. That wasn’t really working out anyway, and thanks to the new study, we now know that vaccine deniers’ imperviousness to facts may be a key part of the reason why.

* This article previously referred to Dartmouth College as Dartmouth University. We regret the error.

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Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

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Rice is the new cocaine for European drug dealers

by RositaRCOdtxyl Posted on February 26, 2014

Rice is the new cocaine for European drug dealers

By

IRRI Images

It’s hard out here for a food eater! Between the rapid desiccation of some of the United States’ most productive farmland, cannibalism and disease on meat farms, and organized criminals in Europe selling long-grain rice as fraudulent basmati, the struggle is real. That last one is not a euphemism.

Departments of Interpol and Europol are beginning to crack down on gangs profiting off of a fairly new form of illegal activity: food fraud. Former drug dealers have hung up their dime bags and moved into the food counterfeiting game because, as it’s still in its nascent stages, legal consequences are almost negligible. The payoff for substituting cheap, low-quality, and often dangerous ingredients for certain in-demand foods and beverages far outweighs the risk — because that makes sense! Welcome to the modern food system; you must be new here.

So there’s now a black market to create additional profits on food that’s already dirt-cheap, thanks to well-oiled industrial food production. Drug runners don’t need to have MBAs to realize that the risks of their old ventures (jail time, turf wars, dead customers) far outweigh those of the new (angry foodies).

As reported by The Independent, some of these substitutions seem fairly benign: Spanish olive oil passed off as extra-virgin Italian; lower-proof alcohol masquerading as vodka; impostor tuna. But consider that the Spanish olives were washed in deodorant, the lower-proof alcohol was mixed with industrial solvent, and the tuna was mislabeled because its mystery-fish source couldn’t be traced … you can see where we’re going here.

The issue has gained some traction in the European press following a study that came out just this month, which found that 40 percent of 900 grocery store samples in the United Kingdom were counterfeit versions of the advertised product.

Who will be affected by this? Well, anyone in Europe who eats food, to start with — and also possibly heroin addicts whose dealers have abandoned the drug trade for greener pastures.

Here in America, ever the land of opportunity and unsustainably cheap food, the counterfeit food market has a lot of potential. But we also love Doritos Locos Tacos, so it’s possible our sky-high tolerance for engineered chemical substances means we might even enjoy a little Old Spice on our olives.

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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How Conservative Brits Tried to Use the Beatles to Win Elections

by mlodyseo7 Posted on February 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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February 9 marks the 50th anniversary of The Beatles‘ historic performance on The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. It was one of the opening salvos of the British Invasion of the mid-1960s, and the broadcast drew 73 million viewers. It is consistently hailed as one of the most influential and biggest (if not the biggest ever) televised moments for rock n’ roll and popular music.

“The Beatles are delightful,” Sullivan said shortly after the performance. “They are the nicest boys I’ve ever met.”

You can watch their 1964 Ed Sullivan performance of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (along with some other gigs) below, via Rolling Stone:

Many tributes and commemorative packages have been prepared for the anniversary. On Sunday, CBS will air a special all-star salute, featuring Stevie Wonder, Gary Clark, Jr., Katy Perry, and ex-Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, among others. The Ed Sullivan appearance was just one of many indicators of The Beatles’ immense popularity and influence. Concert promoters, cultural observers, and screaming teenage girls weren’t the only ones who understood this—British politicians did, too, and they weren’t shy about trying to exploit Beatlemania for electoral gain.

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How Conservative Brits Tried to Use the Beatles to Win Elections

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