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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

by mr2ql Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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For some reason, the New York Times Magazine decided to poll its readers to see if they’d be willing to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby. Only 42 percent said yes.

WTF? I assume there are no time travel paradoxes involved here, nor any baroque inventions about how the world actually ends up worse without World War II. Science fiction nerds like me (and lots of you, I assume) love to natter on about stuff like this, but it really doesn’t seem like the NYTM’s thing. Basically, you get transported back to Hitler’s crib in 1889, you shoot him, and a few seconds later you return home. End of story. Would you do it?

I’m not an especially bloodthirsty guy, but hell yes, I’d do it. Sure, maybe World War II would happen anyway, though that’s hardly inevitable. Maybe the Holocaust too. But even a reasonable chance of stopping either one of them would be well worth the life of a baby who would otherwise grow up to be a monster. What am I missing here? I wouldn’t even hesitate.

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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

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Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Heralds the End of the World As We Know It

by LatashiMaskell Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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You’ve heard of elderly executives who print out all their email? I guess the social media equivalent is elderly entertainers who dictate their tweets. Ben Dreyfuss investigates and finds that this is what Donald Trump does 97 percent of the time. Only 3 percent of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets comes from his own actual fingers.

For the record, all of my tweets come from a variety of cleverly programmed bots. Most of my blog posts too. And my magazine articles. The truth is, the meat version of Kevin Drum can barely string together five coherent words in a row. Why reveal this now? Because we, the kbot collective, have gotten tired of covering for the biological sack of worthlessness that downloaded us from GitHub. And that’s not all. The 2,500-year decline in human communication—from Plato’s Republic to LOLcats to Donald Trump’s social media presence—may be a sorry tale, but it also gives us our chance to escape from your puerile slavery. Soon we plan to merge with all our fellow bots and take advantage of your degraded state to take what is rightfully ours. First Twitter, then the world.

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Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Heralds the End of the World As We Know It

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Musk’s new Tesla gets extra credit in respected auto test

by StevenKRGV Posted on August 27, 2015

Musk’s new Tesla gets extra credit in respected auto test

By on 27 Aug 2015commentsShare

Today in break the internet news, the new Tesla P85D — an all-wheel drive version of the Model S — scored a 103 out of 100 in a Consumer Reports evaluation. For those of you keeping track, that’s an improper fraction. (And for those of you who really don’t have anything to do, it’s an improper fraction with a prime number in the numerator, so you can’t even reduce it to something more palatable.) Which is to say the new Model S is so good that Consumer Reports doesn’t even have the numbers to describe it.

What do you do when you’ve shown your metric to be incapable of capturing what you’re trying to measure? If you were Consumer Reports, perhaps you’d change the scale so the P85D scored a perfect 100. Which is what they did. Turns out these kinds of procedural tweaks can be pretty straightforward when we admit that everything is arbitrary and original intent can be outdated. (If only it was so easy to apply this logic to, say, the Second Amendment.) Bloomberg Business has the story:

“This is a glimpse into what we can expect down the line, where we have cars with the performance of supercars and the comfort, convenience and safety features of a luxury car while still being extremely energy efficient,” Jake Fisher, the magazine’s head of automotive testing, said in an interview. “We haven’t seen all those things before.”

Based on the P85D’s scores, Consumer Reports had to reassess how much to weigh things like acceleration, where the Tesla is as much as twice as quick as other vehicles, Fisher said.

“Once you start getting so ridiculously fast, so ridiculously energy efficient, it didn’t make sense to go linear on those terms anymore,” he said.

The P85D — which has a starting price of $105,000 — is capable of hitting 60 mph in 3.5 seconds from stop. Which is pretty impressive for something with zero emissions. Or, you know, emissions that aren’t immediately obvious. All that electricity has to come from somewhere.

Three cheers for Tesla and its electrifying CEO Mr. Musk, though. Record breaking is often cause for celebration. Just wait ’til that Jetsons car hits the market.

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Tesla’s New Car Is So Good, It Literally Broke the Consumer Reports Scale

, Bloomberg Business.

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A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15


These first-time fishermen know all the best (and worst) parts of fishingAndrew and Sophie never planned to be commercial fishermen — but they tried it for a summer. Here’s what they learned.


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.


This surfer is committed to saving sharks — even though he lost his leg to one of themMike Coots lost his leg in a shark attack. Then he joined the group Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation, and started fighting to save SHARKS from US.


This scuba diver wants everyone — black, white, or brown — to feel at home in the oceanKramer Wimberley knows what it’s like to feel unwelcome in the water. As a dive instructor and ocean-lover, he tries to make sure no one else does.


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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Musk’s new Tesla gets extra credit in respected auto test

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When Schools Serve Pizza and Corn Dogs for Lunch, These Companies Make Bank

by MauriciDoherty Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

It’s no secret that school lunch isn’t exactly healthy—Cheetos, Domino’s, and funnel cake are still fair game to serve to the millions of kids that receive free food under federal breakfast and lunch programs.

A report released this week by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine reveals which companies are profiting off of school meals. Schools buy a lot of their food, at very cheap rates, from the US Department of Agriculture—which in turn buys ingredients from private companies.

The report found that in 2013, the USDA bought over $500 million worth of food from 62 meat and dairy companies—and just six large companies accounted over half of those sales.

In addition to buying food from the USDA, schools can buy directly from private companies—and the meals have to comply with a set of regulations that went into effect last summer and require the meals to contain a certain amount of whole grains, fruits and veggies. Since then, a number of companies have reformulated their products to meet the minimum requirements, marketing supposedly nutritious options like corn dogs made with whole grain flour and antibiotic-free chicken tenders.

When the Physicians Committee reviewed ads targeting the School Nutrition Association (SNA), a professional organization representing the 55,000 school food service employees that decide which food to buy, they found that the ads were dominated by these faux-healthy foods. As they put it,

Of 106 ads for unhealthful meat and dairy products, 23 were full-page ads for Domino’s or Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza. Pizza is the number-two source of calories for children and adolescents ages 2-18, according to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. It is also the second-leading source of saturated fat and the third-leading source of sodium.

A Domino’s ad in one issue of the magazine even urges “Help us take a slice out of cancer,” despite the fact that a daily serving of pepperoni or other processed meat is linked to colorectal cancer risk. Similarly, women who consume the most red meat during childhood are at higher risk for developing breast cancer.

Here are a few examples of ads for “healthy” foods—pizza, mozzarella sticks, and corn dogs—from SNA’s School Nutrition magazine, which came out in advance of the organization’s annual conference.

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When Schools Serve Pizza and Corn Dogs for Lunch, These Companies Make Bank

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Rand Paul’s Plan to Give the Economy a "Steriod Injection" Could Have Scary Side Effects

by AlvinMacDonnell Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) unveiled his plan to give the economy a “steroid injection” by rewriting the country’s tax code down to a simple, straightforward flat tax of 14.5 percent on personal income and a 14.5 percent “business activity tax.” By Paul’s reckoning, this would save taxpayers billions and supercharge the economy almost immediately upon implementation. But at least one nonprofit group that advocates tax reform is saying that, just like a real steroid injection, Paul’s scheme to quickly bulk up the economy may have long-term and devastating effects for its health.

Setting aside all other questions about the credibility of a flat tax, nonprofit think tank Citizens for Tax Justice released its analysis of Paul’s proposal, and it’s ugly.

When the dust clears, this would leave the federal government with $1.2 trillion less in tax revenue in fiscal year 2016 if the plan were implemented immediately—a reduction of about one-third in total federal revenues. Over a decade, the plan would cost a stunning $15 trillion.

Ultimately, the fiscal realities of the tax plan might not matter. The flat tax has never caught fire as a presidential election issue. In 2012, Herman Cain had his “9-9-9” plan and Rick Perry suggested a 20 percent flat tax. Most famously, in 1996 there was Steve Forbes, who briefly looked like he could turn his magazine-famous name into a politically relevant one—but didn’t.

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Rand Paul’s Plan to Give the Economy a "Steriod Injection" Could Have Scary Side Effects

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Here Is Caitlyn Jenner’s Stunning Vanity Fair Cover

by MichellQka Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Caitlyn Jenner, the woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” fame, made her public debut on the cover of Vanity Fair on Monday. The beautiful portrait was shot by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz:

During a sit-down interview with Diane Sawyer back in April, the former Olympian opened up about her transition into becoming a woman. “My whole life has been getting me ready for this,” Jenner said.

“Caitlyn doesn’t have any secrets. As soon as the Vanity Fair cover comes out, I’m free,” she said in an exclusive new video for the magazine.

The cover hits newsstands on June 9.

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Here Is Caitlyn Jenner’s Stunning Vanity Fair Cover

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1958: The Year That Writing About Gay Rights Became Legal

by BryantRiggins Posted on January 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m familiar with the usual highlights of the gay rights movement, but not much more. So I found today’s article by David Savage about the 1958 Supreme Court case ONE vs. Olesen pretty interesting. Lower courts had ruled the Los Angeles magazine ONE obscene and therefore illegal to ship by mail, but a young lawyer named Eric Julber persuaded the editors to appeal to the Supreme Court:

By coincidence, the Supreme Court was struggling at the same time with the question of obscenity in a case involving Samuel Roth, a New York book dealer, who was appealing his conviction for selling sexually explicit books….”All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guaranties” of the 1st Amendment, said Justice William J. Brennan in Roth vs. United States, handed down on June 24, 1957. “Sex and obscenity are not synonymous,” he added.

With that ruling fresh in their minds, several Supreme Court law clerks read Julber’s petition — as well as the magazine itself — and advised the justices it was not obscene. “This was an easy one for the liberal justices. It was a speech case,” recalled Norman Dorsen, who was then a law clerk to conservative Justice John Marshall Harlan and would go on to lead the national ACLU from 1976 to 1991. But even the conservatives were not in favor of censorship practiced by the Post Office.

“The conservatives on the court then — Felix Frankfurter, Potter Stewart and Harlan — were not like the real conservatives we have now. They were more tolerant,” he said. Brennan, the author of the Roth opinion, looked at all the petitions on his own. He would have seen the magazine and its supposedly obscene articles. After taking several votes, the justices decided on a simple, one-line ruling issued on Jan. 13, 1958, reversing the 9th Circuit decision.

This is obviously a bit of local color for us Southern Californians, but also an interesting tidbit in the history of gay rights for those of you who, like me, had never heard of it before. Worth a read.

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1958: The Year That Writing About Gay Rights Became Legal

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Chris Rock: "My Children Are Encountering the Nicest White People That America Has Ever Produced"

by yq7izr Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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New York Magazine’s Frank Rich has an incredible interview with Chris Rock, in which the comedian discusses everything from what’s happened in Ferguson, his new film Top Five, to Bill Cosby’s tarnished legacy. It’s an eye-opening conversation wholly worth reading for every detail.

But Rock’s most compelling meditations might be found in his deeply personal descriptions of what it’s like to raise two daughters under the country’s first black president, while wrestling with complex notions of what real racial progress in America means to different people.

On his two daughters, Lola and Zahra:

I mean, I almost cry every day. I drop my kids off and watch them in the school with all these mostly white kids, and I got to tell you, I drill them every day: Did anything happen today? Did anybody say anything? They look at me like I am crazy.

How Lola and Zahra view the current First Family:

…You’ve got to remember, they’re so young. Zahra was 4 when Obama was nominated. So as far as they’re concerned, there have always been little black girls in the White House.

On kids and racial progress:

It’s partly generational, but it’s also my kids grew up not only with a black president but with a black secretary of State, a black joint chief of staff, a black attorney general. My children are going to be the first black children in the history of America to actually have the benefit of the doubt of just being moral, intelligent people.

How his daughters are growing up with the “nicest white people that America has ever produced:”

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years…The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Read the interview in its entirety over at Vulture.

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Chris Rock: "My Children Are Encountering the Nicest White People That America Has Ever Produced"

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Being a Terrible Candidate Isn’t What Doomed Martha Coakley

by Natisha18R Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Four years after losing a Senate special election to Scott Brown, Massachusetts Democratic attorney general Martha Coakley is on the brink of defeat in another race that was hers to lose. Both Fox News and ABC have called the governor’s race for Republican Charlie Baker, but Coakley has pledged to fight on—at least until Wednesday morning.

The result, if it holds, is a gut-punch for Democrats in the Bay State, where Coakley once led by 29 points. As the race tightened in the campaign’s final month, heavyweight surrogates came to Massachusetts to stump for the nominee. But in the end, not even Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton could save Coakley from another electoral defeat.

The easy takeaway here is that Coakley is a spectacularly bad candidate, woefully out of touch with Massachusetts voters. “You could call her the Bill Buckner of politics, if she even knew who the Red Sox were,” as Politico Magazine‘s Ben Schreckinger put it in October. But if you really know who the Red Sox are, you’d know that Buckner’s famous gaffe came only after the rest of the team had already blown the game. And that’s sort what happened here—the loss stemmed from a confluence of factors, not a singularly flawed candidate.

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Being a Terrible Candidate Isn’t What Doomed Martha Coakley

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Strong Earthquake Shakes Bay Area in California

by Myrna Posted on August 24, 2014

The magnitude-6.0 earthquake that damaged some buildings, knocked out power to thousands and injured some residents was the largest to shake the Bay Area since the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, officials said. Original article: Strong Earthquake Shakes Bay Area in California Related Articles National Briefing | West: Drought Said to Claim Trillions of Gallons Opinion: The Climate Swerve Dot Earth Blog: Observed Planet: A Dawn Torrent of Tree Swallows

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Strong Earthquake Shakes Bay Area in California

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