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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

by MikaylaU07 Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality.

5 Surprising GM Foods

“This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year,” announced a Time Magazine cover back in 2000. Orange in color, the rice is genetically modified to contain a jolt of beta-carotene, the stuff that gives carrots their hue and that our bodies transform into vitamin A. Diets deficient in that key micronutrient are the leading cause of blindness of children in the global south, where rice tends to be a staple grain. A decade and a half since the Time article, golden rice has yet to be planted commercially—but it continues generating bumper crops of hype. “Is Golden Rice the Future of Food?” the great hipster-foodie journal Lucky Peach wondered last fall, adding that “it might save millions from malnutrition.”

If golden rice is such a panacea, why does it flourish only in headlines, far from the farm fields where it’s intended to grow? The short answer is that the plant breeders have yet to concoct varieties of it that work as well in the field as existing rice strains. This is made all the more challenging in the face of debates over genetically modified crops and eternal disputes about how they should be regulated.

After seed developers first create a genetically modified strain with the desired trait—in this case, rice with beta carotene—they then start crossing it into varieties that have been shown to perform well in the field. The task is tricky: When you tweak one thing in a genome, such as giving rice the ability to generate beta-carotene, you risk changing other things, like its speed of growth. The University of Washington anthropologist and long-time golden rice observer Glenn Stone describes this process as “bringing a superfood down to earth,” and it gets little attention in most media accounts.

The most serious effort to commercialize golden rice is centered at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the globe’s most prestigious incubator of high-yielding rice varieties. Launched with grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in 1960, IRRI spearheaded the Asian part of what became known as the Green Revolution—the effort to bring US-style industrial agriculture to the developing world. (My review of Nick Cullather’s excellent Green Revolution history The Hungry World is here.)

Today, IRRI coordinates the Golden Rice Network and has been working to develop a viable strain since 2006. And so far, it’s having trouble. On its website, IRRI reports that in the field latest trials, golden rice varieties “showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety.” However, the website continues, “yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons.” Translation: The golden rice varieties exhibited what’s known in agronomy circles as a “yield drag”—they didn’t produce as much rice as the non-GM varieties they’d need to compete with in farm fields. So the IRRI researchers are going back to the drawing board.

Via email, I asked IRRI how that effort is going. “So far, both agronomic and laboratory data look very promising,” a spokeswoman replied. But she declined to give a time frame for when IRRI thinks it will have a variety that’s ready for prime time. Washington University’s Stone says he visited IRRI’s campus in the Philippines in the summer of 2015 and heard from researchers that such a breakthrough is “at least several more years” off. The IRRI spokeswoman also declined to comment on Stone’s time-frame report.

That’s not a very inspiring assessment, given that researchers first successfully inserted the beta-carotene trait in the rice genome in 2000, and that the technology has been lavished with research support ever since—including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative), USAID, the Syngenta Foundation, and others, according to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.

Of course, among people who think biotechnology has a crucial role to play in solving developing-world malnutrition, IRRI’s agronomic struggles are compounded by anti-GMO zealotry as well as what it sees as over-regulation of GMOs in the global south. David Zilberman, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most developing-world nations, including the Philippines, have adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which stipulates a precautionary approach to introducing new GMO products, including restrictions on how trials are conducted. The Cartagena regime stands in sharp contrast to the much more laissez-faire one that holds sway in the United States, Zilberman says.

If the developing world embraced US-style regulation and treated vitamin A deficiency as a medical emergency solvable by golden rice, “it would have become available in 2000” Zilberman says. Based on that premise, he and German agricultural economist Justus Wesseler co-authored a 2014 paper claiming that golden rice has “been available since early 2000” and opposition to it has resulted in “about 1.4 million life years lost over the past decade in India” alone. Such claims abound in pro-GM circles. At a speech at the University of Texas last year, the Nobel laureate British biochemist Sir Richard Roberts accused gold rice opponents of have having committed a “crime against humanity.”

To be sure, opposition to golden rice has occasionally gone overboard. In 2013, activists destroyed one of of IRRI’s golden rice field trials in the Philippines, for example. “Anti-GMO activism has set back our work, in that we not only concentrate with our research, but we have to also spend time and resources to counter their propaganda,” the IRRI spokesperson told me. But the group makes clear that regulation and activism are only two of the challenges facing golden rice—getting it to perform well remains a major task.

Even if and when IRRI does come up with a high-yielding golden rice variety that passes regulatory muster, it remains unclear whether it can actually make a dent in vitamin A deficiency. As the Washington University’s Stone notes, vitamin A deficiency often affects people whose diets are also deficient in other vital nutrients. Vitamin A is fat soluble, meaning that it can’t be taken up by the body unless it’s accompanied by sufficient dietary fat, which isn’t delivered in significant quantities by rice, golden or otherwise.

According to Stone, only one feeding study (PDF) has ever showed a powerful uptake of vitamin A by subjects eating golden rice. The paper was much-cited by golden rice proponents, but Stone says it had a major flaw: The subjects were “well-nourished individuals” who already took in sufficient fat in their diets. The study “demonstrated only that Golden Rice worked in children who did not need it,” he writes. (The study has since been retracted on claims that the author failed to obtain proper consent from the parents of the participants).

Meanwhile, as IRRI scrambles to perfect golden rice, the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency is declining in the Philippines—according to IRRI itself— from 40 percent of children aged 6 months to 5 years in 2003, to 15.2 percent in 2008. “The exact reasons for these improvements have not been determined, but they may be the results of proven approaches to preventing vitamin A deficiency, such as vitamin A supplementation, dietary diversification, food fortification and promotion of optimal breastfeeding,” the group noted. That drop is part of a long-term trend that involves all of Southeast Asia. According to a 2015 Lancet study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, vitamin A deficiency plagued 39 percent of children in the region in 1991, but only 6 percent in 2013—without the help of golden rice.

But VAD, as the deficiency’s known, remains a huge scourge on the Indian sub-continent and in Africa, the study found, affecting more than 40 percent of children in both regions. Whether golden rice will ever help mitigate that ongoing tragedy won’t likely be known for some time. But the technology’s hardly the slam-dunk panacea its advocates insist it is.

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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

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Closing This Nuclear Plant Could Cause an Environmental Disaster

by GladisHouchins Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant sits by the scenic hills overlooking the California coast, a few hours’ drive north of Los Angeles. It’s the state’s only remaining nuclear plant (after the San Onofre plant was closed in 2013), and it’s responsible for about one-tenth of the state’s electricity, serving more than 3 million homes and businesses.

Since construction on the plant began in the late 1960s, Diablo Canyon has been a focal point of the nationwide controversy over nuclear power. In 1981, roughly 2,000 protesters (including the singer-songwriter Jackson Browne) were arrested at the construction site. Ever since, the plant has faced opposition from environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. But now, the plant is attracting an unlikely wave of support from some of the country’s most prominent environmentalists and climate change scientists.

Last week, in an effort to ensure that Diablo Canyon isn’t shut down in the near future, this new coalition sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown (D); the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that owns the plant; and five state regulatory officials. The letter warned that “closing Diablo Canyon would make it far harder to meet the state’s climate goals.” The 61 signatories include Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, climate scientists James Hansen of Columbia University and Kerry Emanuel of MIT, and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

Their concerns center around an upcoming-ish deadline for PG&E to renew the plant’s operating license. The current license is good through 2024 for one of the plant’s two units and 2025 for the other. If PG&E wants to keep the plant running after that, it will need to seek approval from Brown’s administration and possibly from local officials in San Luis Obispo County. In its letter, the group called for a renewed operating license that could keep the plant running into the 2040s.

But the utility is on the fence. “We have not made a decision to move forward with license renewal,” a spokesperson said, adding that the company is in the middle of a study on seismic activity in the area. (The plant is near a few major fault lines.) In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tony Earley, the utility’s CEO, was more blunt: “We’ve got a lot on our plates, and we just don’t need to take on another big public issue right now.” And while 2024 may seem like a long way off, the license renewal process can take a long time, and utility executives have been quietly mulling it since at least 2009.

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As the global campaign against climate change has gathered steam in recent years, old controversies surrounding nuclear energy have been re-ignited. For all its supposed faults—radioactive waste, links to the Cold War arms race, the specter of a catastrophic meltdown—nuclear plants have the benefit of producing huge amounts of electricity with zero greenhouse gas emissions. That may not have mattered much to Jackson Browne and his fellow activists in the ’80s, but it matters now. A recent analysis by the International Energy Agency found that in order for the world to meet the global warming limit enshrined in the Paris climate agreement in December, nuclear’s share of global energy production will need to grow from around 11 percent in 2013 to 16 percent by 2030. (The share from coal, meanwhile, needs to shrink from 41 percent to 19 percent, and wind needs to grow from 3 percent to 11 percent.)

In Paris, Hansen—probably the world’s most influential climate scientist since he first warned Congress about global warming back in 1988—gave a talk in which he said nuclear “has tremendous potential to be part of the solution to climate change.” It was a point Hansen and some of his allies have made repeatedly over the past year in talks and op-eds. That message has opened a rift in an otherwise cohesive bloc of climate hawks: Those who think a carbon-free energy future is impossible without nuclear are now squaring off against those who think the challenge can be met using only renewables like wind and solar.

Among the former group is Michael Shellenberger, who until recently was president of the Oakland-based environmental think tank Breakthrough Institute and now runs a new group, Environmental Progress. Shellenberger organized the Diablo Canyon campaign after he realized that the larger debate about nuclear could be crystallized around this one existing plant.

“I’m tired of arguing about the future,” he said. “Let’s decide what we’re going to do right now with the largest single source of clean energy in California.”

According to Shellenberger’s research, Diablo Canyon currently produces twice as much power as all the state’s solar panels (California is the nation’s No. 1 solar state). Closing it, he said, would not only shave off one-fifth of the state’s zero-carbon energy, but potentially increase the state’s emissions by an amount equivalent to putting 2 million cars on the road per year. That’s because the power gap left by the plant’s closure would likely be filled by new natural gas plants—which is what happened when San Onofre was shuttered.

“What’s powerful about Diablo is the sheer size of it,” he said. “If you flip it off, carbon emissions go up so much.”

That’s an important quandary for Gov. Brown, who has tried to position his state as a national leader on climate policy and clean energy. During his first term as governor in the mid-’70s, Brown opposed the plant. But in 2012 he said he had become more open to nuclear power because “it’s good for greenhouse gases.” Brown’s office declined to comment on Shellenberger’s letter.

Gov. Jerry Brown addresses an anti-nuclear rally near the Diablo Canyon power plant in 1979. At the time, he was opposed to nuclear power, but his views may have softened. Brich/AP

California played an outsize role at the Paris talks, with a bevy of the state’s political and business leaders, including Brown, touting the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, its cap-and-trade program and clean-energy investment, and other successes. Still, the state’s rate of reducing carbon emissions is slower than the national average—a 7.5 percent reduction since 2000, compared with 9.6 percent nationwide. It will need to pick up the pace in order to meet its ultimate goal of bringing statewide greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The problem, Shellenberger said, is that despite the plethora of solar panels on rooftops and electric vehicles on the roads, “people don’t understand how little that stuff is compared to a single nuclear plant.” Moreover, he added, a nuclear plant has the benefit of being consistent regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

Other analysts have reached different conclusions less favorable to nuclear. A 2015 state-commissioned study by the private research firm Energy and Environmental Economics found that the state could meet its 2030 climate goals without nuclear by rapidly growing renewables and by investing in upgrades to energy efficiency and the electric grid.

Mark Jacobson—an engineering professor at Stanford University who has authored several prominent studies on how the United States could run on 100 percent renewable energy—added that he was confident California could meet its clean energy targets without nuclear. “Repairing Diablo Canyon will not only be costly, diverting funds from the development of more clean, renewable energy, but it will also result in down time, resulting in emissions from the background grid, which currently still emits pollution and carbon,” he said in an email. (“Background grid” refers to the normal electric grid, which would have to pick up the slack in Diablo Canyon’s absence.) According to Jacobs, “a more efficient solution would be to use those funds to grow clean, renewable energy further.”

For now, the fate of Diablo Canyon is unclear. But Steven Weissman, an environmental lawyer at the University of California-Berkeley who has watched Diablo Canyon from the beginning, said ultimately the state’s biggest problem isn’t its small share of power from nuclear—it’s the majority share coming from natural gas and coal.

“How are you going to deal with the power coming from fossil fuels?” he said. “If you don’t solve that, you won’t solve your climate goals.”

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Closing This Nuclear Plant Could Cause an Environmental Disaster

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One Hospital in This City Gave Vulnerable Women an Option. Now It’s Gone.

by MercedeDennis Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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If a pregnant woman in the Greater Cincinnati area receives the diagnosis of a fetal abnormality such as Tay-Sachs disease or anencephaly—in which a major part of the fetus’ brain does not develop—she is no longer able to terminate the pregnancy in a local hospital.

The Christ Hospital in Mount Auburn was the last hospital in the city of more than 2 million to provide this service, but two months ago it enacted a new policy that prohibits physicians from performing abortions in fetal anomaly cases. The hospital will now only terminate pregnancies “in situations deemed to be a threat to the life of the mother,” the new policy reads.

“The cases are highly emotional and tragic,” Danielle Craig, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Under these circumstances, for many patients, an overnight stay in a hospital is better than an outpatient procedure, and women should have that option.”

Comprehensive fetal testing, like ultrasounds of the heart and anatomical sonograms, are typically performed at around 20 weeks’ gestation and can reveal a host of disorders, from genetic problems to fetal development gone awry. Late mid-term abortions are less common than first-trimester abortions, so this option is likely taken by women who are facing some kind of severe fetal birth defect.

For women in Cincinnati who decide to terminate their pregnancies after receiving this diagnosis, the only other option to get an abortion would be at the local Planned Parenthood affiliate. But if the abnormality comes with certain health risks that may complicate the procedure and endanger the life of the mother, the case would have to be referred back to a hospital outside the Greater Cincinnati area, according to Craig.

According to the Ohio Department of Health’s annual report, only 84 of more than 21,000 abortions were performed in hospitals in 2014—merely 0.4 percent of all abortions statewide. Christ Hospital reported performing a total of 59 such abortions in the past five and a half years.

Ohio has several abortion restrictions in place, including requiring counseling with information to discourage abortions, a 24-hour waiting period between counseling and abortion, and the right for all medical professional and institutions to refuse to provide an abortion.

Bans on abortion because of fetal abnormalities are not common in the United States. Only North Dakota has a statewide ban. Arizona, Minnesota, and Oklahoma require counseling if a hospital abortion is sought because of a lethal fetal abnormality. And in some cases, as with the Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, a single hospital enacts the policy.

During the 2012 presidential race, candidate Rick Santorum declared that 90 percent of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted, but no comprehensive data exists on how many women choose to abort after a fetal abnormality is detected. In early 2013, Americans United for Life put forth draft model legislation that aimed to end “discrimination based on genetic abnormalities,” as AUL president and CEO Charmaine Yoest put it. The North Dakota ban was a result—Indiana and Missouri also picked it up, but the measures ultimately failed.

The Zika virus—a virus transmitted by both mosquitos and sexual encounters that may be linked to microcephaly—has focused attention on the issue of pregnancy termination in cases of fetal abnormalities. Women in El Salvador, Brazil, Honduras, and Colombia, where the virus is spreading, have been urged to avoid pregnancy. While the North American climate is inhospitable to the mosquito population that is responsible for the spread closer to the equator, the potential reach of the virus does include a small sliver of the southern United States, according to a map by the World Health Organization.

Should the virus spread in the United States, women who live where fetal abnormality abortions are prohibited may still have an option. In the 1960s, when the rubella pandemic hit, the virus caused birth defects such as blindness and deafness. Although abortion was illegal in the decade before Roe v. Wade, “therapeutic abortions“—meaning doctors verified that the procedure was medically necessary—were allowed.

The specifics of the Zika virus are still being determined by scientists and medical professionals, but if the connection between the virus and microcephaly is confirmed, it could have a powerful impact on reproductive policy in Latin America and the United States.

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One Hospital in This City Gave Vulnerable Women an Option. Now It’s Gone.

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Schools Across America Are Facing a Rash of Shooting and Bomb Threats

by BreannaDonohoe Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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On January 19, a high school in Gardiner, Maine, received a message saying there was a bomb inside the school and a shooting was imminent. That day in Millsboro, Delaware, a caller claimed to be armed and on the roof of an elementary school, threatening to injure students and staff. In Wellington, Florida, a threat of a shooting was found on a sign at Palm Beach Central high school—the third threat on Palm Beach County schools in just over a week.

That was only a portion of the dozens of threats against schools that day, including those targeting nearly 30 schools in New Jersey. Amid an atmosphere of insecurity from a bad year of mass shootings in 2015, a wave of violent threats has hit schools across the nation. A series of bomb threats disrupted Ohio schools last fall, drawing attention from the Department of Homeland Security. And in December, threats resulted in a shutdown of all 900 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, with the region still on edge after the San Bernardino massacre. (Similar threats to New York City schools the same day were deemed less worrisome and drew a different response.)

Threats to schools are nothing new, and the vast majority of them turn out to be benign. According to experts, there is no comprehensive national data on school threats, so there is no way to determine if the recent problems represent a rising trend. Growing awareness of them could be explained by increased media coverage, for example. We asked experts to help explain what’s going on.

Are bomb and shooting threats to schools on the rise? Kenneth Trump, the president of the National School Safety and Security Services, says that based on a limited study he did using news reports, it appears there has been a recent uptick in school threats. Last February, Trump released a study that reviewed 812 threats reported in the media from the first half of the 2014-15 school year and found that threats had risen 158 percent since the first time he conducted such a study the prior year. That said, no law enforcement agencies tally the number of school threats, and there is no mandate for schools themselves to track or report them, so there is no way to be confident about a trend one way or the other.

The early warning signs that could help prevent the next attack

How are the threats being made? Of the 812 threats Trump assessed, more than one-third were sent electronically, either by email or on social-media platforms. Others are phoned in. Perpetrators sometimes use internet phone systems to call in threats using anonymous numbers and computer-generated voices. This is a tactic called “swatting,” which is intended to trick law enforcement officers into responding to a perceived threat.

That turned out to be behind a disruption last week in which 30 schools in New Jersey and elsewhere received automated phone calls traced to Bakersfield, California, announcing bomb threats in “robotic-sounding voices.” The tactic originated in the online gaming community, sometimes as part of a game and sometimes as a form of retaliation. “Some people have the capability of tracking you by your IP address, getting your location, and using technology to spoof a 911 call, for example, that would actually make it appear like it was from your address,” explains Trump. Similarly, some threats are sent electronically through international proxy servers that disguise the identity of the sender. “Schools have been a major target,” he says.

How do authorities rate the seriousness of these threats? “The vast majority of threats are young people who make very poor decisions, looking at it as a prank or a hoax that won’t have serious consequences and not realizing that a ton of bricks is going to fall on them—suspension, expulsion, or felony prosecution,” says Trump.

The threats fall into two basic categories: “Transient” and “substantial” threats. Transient threats tend to be made impulsively, out of a moment of anger or perhaps even out of fear related to academic pressures, according to Scott Poland, a psychology professor and school crisis expert at Nova Southeastern University. Poland says the overwhelming majority of bomb threats are transient, according to his own and Trump’s research. “We’ve even had threats come in from high-flying students like, ‘I’m not ready for my AP history test today.'” Authorities generally regard these threats to be of little concern.

Substantial threats are when the perpetrator has a grudge, has developed plans to strike, or has access to weapons. For example, when two teens threatened to kill “as many students as possible” at South Pasadena High School in 2012, the police uncovered sufficient evidence to consider the threats credible, including that the teens had researched weapons and how to make explosive devices. But plots like these are rare.

Some threats are more difficult to gauge. For example, last Monday some 2,000 students in Tallahassee, Florida, stayed home from school or were taken out of class by their parents after four schools received threats posted to social-media accounts warning that students would be shot if they went to school. The posts were shared widely on social media and went viral, and in the following days those schools operated under heightened security as law enforcement investigated.

A threat against Godby High School in Tallahassee, Florida, was posted to Instagram and went viral. Tallahassee Democrat

How much danger are school kids really in? Experts caution that anecdotal evidence of a rise in threats doesn’t mean schools have become more dangerous places. The chances of any given school coming under attack are infinitesimal. “Our perception of this is just totally off,” says Poland. He surveyed his doctoral students as to whether they thought the average college or university can expect a homicide on campus every 7 years, every 30 years, or every 175 years. “They all went for every 7 years, when the reality is that it’s about every 200 years.” Schools are the safest places children go,” adds Poland, noting that when schools cancel classes without assessing the validity of a threat it may actually put students more in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s top school safety official, David Esquith, said at a recent conference that despite high-profile mass shootings, “schools are safer than they’ve ever been.”

How should schools respond? “School threat assessment teams are sorely lacking across the country, as are training and protocols associated with such teams,” says Trump. This can lead to poor policy decisions, he says. In Trump’s study, 30 percent of the schools evacuated and 10 percent closed for at least one day.

Los Angeles Unified School District said in December that it closed its 900 schools out of an abundance of caution. “It’s really pretty hard to argue with that,” notes Poland—unless you stop to think of the disruption to the lives of families. “I would argue that the several hundred thousand students would have been safest at school, with increased surveillance, than they would be on the streets.” One high school student, he notes, was struck and killed by a utility truck when the district was shut down that day.

“Administrators and police are reacting and then assessing instead of the other way around,” Poland adds. Threat assessment teams, training, and better crisis communications plans would help ease unnecessary school closings, he says. “When threats become known in the community, misinformation spreads, and school leaders have to not only manage the threat and the investigation of it, but also the communications crisis at the same time.”

One positive development, Trump says, is that schools and law enforcement agencies are increasingly coordinating to counter and resolve such threats, a practice that wasn’t so common in the past.

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Schools Across America Are Facing a Rash of Shooting and Bomb Threats

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Vampire Weekend Played This Classic Song in Honor of Bernie Sanders in Iowa

by BelindaPowell Posted on January 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Caucus season in Iowa produces weird, unexpected scenes. As I walked into a coffee shop in downtown Iowa City on Saturday afternoon for a writing pit stop between campaign events, I noticed a growing crowd in the far back of the room. Turns out the indie band Vampire Weekend (joined by a member of fellow Brooklyn hipster band Dirty Projectors), scheduled to play a major rally for Bernie Sanders later this evening, had announced on Twitter that they’d be playing a pre-show warm-up set at the coffee house, and the college kids from the University of Iowa had quickly flocked. Pressed into a corner in a packed room, it was difficult to get a good head count, but the wall-to-wall crowd easily numbered into the several hundred.

Was the young crowd there for Bernie, or just a free show? Mostly the latter from my vantage point. Joey Sogard, a sophmore at Iowa State University, made the two-hour drive for the rally. So a big Bernie supporter, right? “Well, more Vampire Weekend and Foster the People,” Sogard said, mentioning another band scheduled to play at Sanders rally. Well, would he at least be caucusing for Sanders? “I don’t know what caucusing is, I’ve been explained a thousand times, but I don’t know,” he said with a laugh.

The friends he had roadtripped with were more definitive Sanders fans, though. Zoey Mauck, an Iowa-native familiar with the caucusing process, said she would be in Sanders’ camp Monday night. “I just like his stance on a lot of issues, especially the environmental stuff,” she said. “Something about Bernie I just really like. But if it goes Hillary, I don’t really care.”

Nearby, a woman wearing a zebra-patterned-bear backpack was handing out buttons and stickers emblazoned with a Donald-Trump-as-fly-covered-feces design.

When the band took the stage, they encouraged the crowd to come to watch Sanders speak later in the evening—”that’s what this is all about,” lead singer Ezra Koenig said—but the crowd mostly saved its applause for Vampire Weekend’s hits. Still, Koenig did his best to keep things focused on the Bern, explaining that they mostly wanted to play a pre-rally set in order to tune up, since “we cannot embarrass ourselves in front of Bernie.”

The short, six-song set ended with a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” which Koenig said was in honor of the album of folk covers Sanders recorded in 1987.

“How dope would it be to have a recording artist in the White House,” Koenig wondered to the students.

“Kanye 2020!” Came a shout from the crowd.

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Vampire Weekend Played This Classic Song in Honor of Bernie Sanders in Iowa

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

by CarmellCvf Posted on January 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has taken a lot of heat lately for its failure to nominate any actors of color for the Oscars, two years running. But race may not be Hollywood’s biggest diversity problem.

The number of women directing big-budget films and TV series is stunningly low. Only 9 percent of the directors of last year’s 250 top-grossing movies were female, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. And women accounted for just 12 percent of the directors on more than 225 shows on prime-time TV and Netflix during the 2014-15 season.

The numbers are even more depressing for women of color. Black women directed just 2 of the 500 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2012, according to a study by the Women’s Media Center. Women of color directed only 3 percent of TV episodes during the 2014-15 season, notes a report from the Directors Guild of America.

The numbers aren’t improving, either. The share of big-budget directorial jobs going to women was lower last year than it was 15 years earlier, when it peaked. The TV numbers have been stagnant in recent years. “Women’s underemployment has simply not been perceived by many executives as a problem,” says Martha Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, who has been gathering data on the topic for nearly two decades. “As a result, little meaningful action has been taken to correct the gender imbalance.”

The shunning of female directors is so rampant that the feds have gotten involved. In October, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, began interviewing female directors so that “we may learn more about the gender-related issues” they face. The probe came after the American Civil Liberties Union called on the EEOC to investigate the film industry’s systemic failure to hire women directors. The agency contacted at least 50 women in October, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In an email, an EEOC representative acknowledged that the agency has “had further discussions” with the ACLU about its data and conclusions, but she said she could not comment on any investigation—or even confirm whether one exists. The EEOC, she wrote, encourages the industry to “publicly address the serious issues raised by the ACLU.”

Part of the problem, female directors told the ACLU, is that male producers often make hiring decisions based on tired stereotypes. Women said they were steered toward romantic comedies and “women-oriented” movies, while the most lucrative, action-driven films went almost exclusively to men. Female TV directors said they were offered shows for women and commercials for “girl” products while being overlooked for car commercials or other types of shows.

What’s more, Hollywood producers, who are overwhelmingly male, will often pick directors from short lists that contain few women, or through word of mouth. Women who haven’t yet directed a major project often end up on the sidelines.

Hiring more female directors could be key to improving Hollywood’s gender imbalance. When women are in charge, Lauzen found, the number of women employed behind the scenes increases considerably: On high-grossing films directed by men in 2015, women made up 10 percent of writers, 19 percent of editors, and 10 percent of cinematographers. When a woman was the director, female representation on the crew increased to 53 percent of writers, 32 percent of editors, and 12 percent of cinematographers.

At stake in all of this, Lauzen explains, is how women are represented on-screen. “People tend to create what they know. Having lived their lives as males, men tend to create male characters,” she says. “If women comprised a larger percentage of film directors, we would see more female characters, particularly as protagonists, onscreen, and we would see more fully developed, multidimensional females.” In another study, Lauzen found that women accounted for just 4 percent of protagonists in films with exclusively male directors or writers. But when at least one woman was writing or directing, nearly 40 percent of the protagonists were female.

TV is way ahead of the film industry on that front—think Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, How to Get Away With Murder’s Annalise Keating, or Jane Villanueva of Jane the Virgin. As X-Files star Gillian Anderson (who says she was initially offered about half of David Duchovny’s salary to reprise her role as Dana Scully) recently put it to Mother Jones: “Television isn’t the issue. There are a lot of female characters on TV who are intelligent, and a good enough portion of them aren’t all about the date and the car and the plastic surgery. It’s in film that it’s lacking…I think there’s a lot of female directors out there—I just don’t think their material gets made. Studios don’t believe they’ll have an audience if women make it. A lot of female directors can’t pay somebody to hire them.”

The Directors Guild’s current agreement with film and TV studios has no quotas for women but asks employers to “make good faith efforts to increase the number of working” women and minority directors. Last May, the Guild’s Women’s Steering Committee considered altering the agreement to treat women and ethnic minorities as separate diversity categories. Supporters of the change felt that it would create more opportunities for women—particularly women of color, who would qualify for both pools. The idea never made it out of committee.

But since the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission got involved in October, there has been some movement within the industry. Two weeks after the agency started its probe, several dozens of Hollywood’s leading CEOs, producers, writers, and directors met privately to discuss solutions to their industry’s gender problem. Among the ideas discussed were introducing “unconscious bias” training across the industry, creating more recruitment programs to identify and hire talented women directors, and rewarding studios that show a commitment to achieving gender parity in hiring.

Gillian Thomas, an attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, says that while an investigation as expansive as this one will take time, she thinks it will ultimately produce results. “I think women in male industries is a priority of the agency’s,” she says. “So I have faith in the process working.”

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

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What Wrecked Ben Carson’s Campaign? Ex-Staffers Blame His Close Friend.

by NoreenOuthwaite Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson took to a stage in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday to let the world know that just because Armstrong Williams, his longtime friend and close adviser, says something, that doesn’t mean it’s true. That remark was a kick in the teeth to Williams, a prominent and controversial black conservative pundit and PR specialist who calls himself Carson’s business manager, and it naturally made headlines. But hours later, Carson joined Williams on Williams’ nightly radio show and declared that he had complete faith in Williams, who has played an outsize—and perhaps negative—role in Carson’s presidential campaign.

What the heck was going on? The Carson campaign already had enough to worry about in the final days before the Iowa caucuses. Carson at one point led the GOP pack in Iowa, but for weeks he’s been stuck in single digits in the polls. And once more the story for his campaign was internal chaos and Carson’s odd relationship with Williams. It was the latest iteration of a deep problem that, according to Carson staffers who recently quit, has dogged the campaign from the beginning and may well doom it.

From the start, the Carson campaign has seemed afflicted with a split personality caused by Caron’s relationship with Williams. Carson’s campaign staffers, seasoned GOP operatives, were trying to conduct a professional effort with an orderly chain of command. Yet Williams would make decisions on his own and on the fly that would contradict or undermine the campaign’s plans. And Carson—too often, according to his former staffers—did what Williams advised him to do. For instance, Williams, without informing the campaign brass, often set up media interviews that ended up hurting Carson and the campaign.

A strange pattern developed. Carson would publicly deny that Williams, who years ago worked for Sen. Strom Thurmond and then Clarence Thomas before his appointment to the Supreme Court, had any significant role in the campaign. But days later, Williams would pop up on television, speaking on behalf of the former neurosurgeon. Apparently in charge. Or something.

Several former staffers now say that Williams was always at the helm of the campaign—without any official title—and Carson constantly followed his guidance. In other words, when Carson was publicly stating that Williams did not have much to do with the campaign, he was not speaking truthfully.

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How America’s Gun Manufacturers Are Quietly Getting Richer Off Taxpayers

by SelmaMccombs Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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In January 2013, a month after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the state of New York passed gun control legislation that included a ban on the retail sale of assault weapons. Soon after, Remington Outdoor Company, the maker of the Bushmaster assault rifle used in the massacre, announced it would lay off workers at its 200-year-old factory in Ilion and move production to Huntsville, Alabama. Then CEO George Kollitides explained in a letter to New York officials that the move was brought on by “state policies affecting use of our products.”

The gun lobby crowed about political payback: “We hope that sends a very strong message,” remarked then National Rifle Association’s president, Jim Porter, on an NRA radio show. What Porter didn’t mention was what Alabama had done to sweeten the deal: By relocating to Huntsville, Remington, a $1 billion firearms conglomerate owned by the Manhattan private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, would receive state and local grants, tax breaks, and other incentives worth approximately $69 million—the equivalent of getting about $14 from every resident of Alabama.

Since 2003, state and local governments from Alabama to Tennessee have given more than $120 million worth of taxpayer funds to at least seven major firearms companies, according to research by Mother Jones. Most of those subsidies—nearly $100 million—have been pledged just over the past three years by states seeking to lure gun producers from the Northeast, where new firearm regulations have angered industry leaders.

“I’ve had CEOs in New England tell me that the offers from states’ economic development teams are so extraordinary that they could essentially move their factories for free,” Larry Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Federation, told Guns & Ammo. “In some cases they’ve received these offers almost daily over extended periods of time.”

After Maryland passed stringent new gun regulations in 2013, Beretta announced it would shutter its factory there and relocate to a state that has shown “consistent, strong support for Second Amendment rights,” as its attorney, Jeff Reh, put it at the time. But politics wasn’t the only factor in Beretta’s move. The city of Gallatin, Tennessee, eventually won the new factory after it offered Beretta $14.4 million in state and local subsidies. “The level of community support was better,” a Beretta spokesman acknowledged in the Charlotte Business Journal, explaining why that city had lost its bid for the plant.

Southern states have long relied on financial and regulatory incentives to attract manufacturers from more industrialized parts of the country. “I think Remington is doing what Mercedes did for us in the automobile business—it opens the door to opportunity,” Porter told the Birmingham Business Journal. Yet Porter suggested gun companies would enjoy an exceptional welcome: “You will have the support of the administration, you will have the support of the population—everybody in the state is going to be lining up to work for Remington.”

Major politicians have gone the extra mile to attract gun companies. In wooing the Beretta factory, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam flew to Italy and met with the Beretta family in a posh wine country villa. Haslam later invited Franco Gussalli Beretta, the head of the company’s American subsidiary, to the governor’s mansion for dinner. Nobody in Tennessee seemed to object to the deal’s $14.4 million price tag. “We believe that our brand as the state of Tennessee has taken on new luster because Beretta has chosen to locate here,” Haslan said at the groundbreaking ceremony, “and we are forever grateful.”

Another incentive for gun companies to relocate south has been lax labor laws. In an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, a Sturm Ruger spokesman admitted the company built a new plant in North Carolina instead of expanding an existing one in Newport, New Hampshire, because it wanted to set up shop in a right-to-work state. Similarly, Remington’s move from New York to Alabama, another right-to-work state, decimated the New York plant’s trade union.

Some Northeastern states have also funneled tax dollars to the firearms industry. Between 2009 and 2014, New York-based Kimber Manufacturing received nearly $1 million in tax abatements and state and local grants—money meant to ensure the company would keep cranking out upwards of 150,000 handguns a year with its factory in Yonkers. Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts have also offered incentives to attract or retain gun manufacturers. But most such enticements are now in the South.

Here are the seven gun companies that have received state and local subsidies in recent years:

Remington Arms, Madison, North Carolina
Move: Owned by a New York private equity fund, Remington in 2014 laid off more than 100 workers at its 200-year-old unionized factory in Ilion, New York (the site of its original headquarters) and opened a new nonunion factory in Huntsville, Alabama.
Subsidy: $68.9 million in cash, worker training, tax abatements, real estate, and construction work from state and local governments. The company also received nearly $12 million in grants, tax credits, and other benefits from New York, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma in exchange for training workers and expanding or retaining factories.

Sturm Ruger, Southport, Connecticut
Move: In 2014, the nation’s largest gun company opened a new factory in Mayodan, North Carolina, instead of expanding an existing factory in New Hampshire.
Subsidy: $15.5 million in state tax breaks, employee training, infrastructure construction, and other incentives. The company has also received $150,288 in training subsidies from New Hampshire.

Berretta USA, Accokeek, Maryland
Move: The Italian gun maker last year closed its Maryland plant and moved all US production to a massive factory in Gallatin, Tennessee.
Subsidy: The company will receive $10.41 million in state-funded building improvements and job training grants. The town of Gallatin also kicked in land and tax abatements worth nearly $4 million.

Smith & Wesson, Springfield, Massachusetts.
Move: Publicly traded Smith & Wesson announced in 2010 that it would move its hunting rifle division from New Hampshire to Springfield, Massachusetts.
Subsidy: $6.6 million in state and local tax breaks. The company has also received $158,791 in worker-training subsidies from Massachusetts.

Colt’s Manufacturing, Hartford, Connecticut
Move: In 2011 Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced a deal in which the 180-year-old gun company would open a factory in Kissimmee, saying it showed the state was “a defender of our right to bear arms.” But then Colt walked away from the project for unknown reasons. The company declared bankruptcy last year.
Subsidy: $1.66 million in state and local incentives. Government officials are now trying to claw back the money.

O.F. Mossberg & Sons, North Haven, Connecticut.
Move: The world’s largest manufacturer of pump-action shotguns has gradually shifted manufacturing from Connecticut to a factory in Eagle Pass, Texas. In 2014, it added 116,000 square feet to the factory, which now accounts for 90 percent of its production.
Subsidy: A $300,000 grant in 2014 from the taxpayer-funded Texas Enterprise Fund.

Kimber Manufacturing, Elmsford, New York
Move: America’s largest manufacturer of 1911 pistols hasn’t moved out of New York—at least not yet. In 2012 the company warned that the state’s NY SAFE gun control law might “cause it to reconsider its current expansion.”
Subsidy: In 2009, Kimber received a $700,000 state grant to expand its manufacturing capacity in Yonkers. In 2012 and 2013, it received nearly $300,000 in local tax credits.

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Here’s the Latest on the Epic Snowstorm Bearing Down on the East Coast

by RegenaDegree879 Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yes, 2015 was the warmest year on record. And yes, parts of the East Coast are in for big snow and ice storms this weekend. Those two facts are not contradictory.

With that out of the way, here’s what to expect from Winter Storm Jonas.

The latest forecast from the National Weather Service shows “a potentially paralyzing storm” that could affect up to 50 million people, NWS director Louis Uccellini told reporters Thursday afternoon.

“Right now, the heaviest snow starts in the mid-Atlantic late Friday afternoon and then progresses up to the New York City area by Saturday morning,” he said.

The heaviest snow impact is likely to land on Washington, DC:

Especially in New York and New Jersey, where snowfall could be up to one foot, major flooding is also predicted, on par with what you would expect from major hurricane landfall. Farther south, Uccellini said, Kentucky and North Carolina could face ice storms and freezing rain. Through the weekend, he said, East Coasters should expect delays affecting highways and air travel. The electric utility in DC said it has hundreds of crew members standing by to fix downed electric lines, and Port Authority workers in New Jersey are preparing to insulate underground train systems from the flooding:

As my Climate Desk friend Eric Holthaus explains at Slate, this storm is “the real deal.” Uccellini said his staff are working around the clock (and sleeping in their offices) and doubling the number of weather balloons being dispatched to get the best up-to-date forecast. But even now, he said he was surprised by the unusual level of agreement across a wide range of models, satellite reports, and other data sources. In other words, chances are slim that the storm turns out to be a nothingburger.

“I would suggest people pay attention to this system,” he said.

The upshot: Now’s the time to buy some bottled water and batteries, and don’t drive to work tomorrow if you can help it. Oh, and, uh, make sure to tweet responsibly:

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Here’s the Latest on the Epic Snowstorm Bearing Down on the East Coast

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3 Ways Climate Change Affects How We Spend Money

by TVEJarred6824744 Posted on January 20, 2016

Climate change is predicted to have a major impact on many aspects of our lives. Average global temperatures will increase, sea levels will rise, allergiesmay get worse (seriously, it’s likely that they will) theres little question that there will be many complicated biological ramifications.

But what about the cultural and economic changes that might accompany climate change? Some have argued that climate change may increase violence, and surely there will be other societal implications we cant yet predict. Experts do have ideas, though, for what a warmer planet might mean for our spending habits. Here are three trends you may see come to pass in the coming decades:

Fewer luxury goods

A recent study put forth by Swiss banking group UBS suggests that in cities where the threat of climate-related disasters looms large, middle-class families are spending less on luxury goods than they have in the past. They found that in climate-strapped cities such as Los Angeles, Taipei, Tokyo, Mumbai, Shanghai and New Orleans, families had to spend more of their income on housing and repairs, forcing them to scale back on expensive splurges in the realms of entertainment and luxuries.

“More fear, less fun is how we might sum it up,” said the authors of the study.

The study noted that 2015 was the most expensive year on record in terms of natural disasters; a whopping $32 billion were lost within the first half of 2015 alone due to instances of extreme weather.

More sharing

Though the rise of the sharing economy is no doubt attributable to a number of factors, its a huge trend thats expected to continue growing as temperatures rise. This may or may not be a good thing for the environment. While car ownership appears to be decreasing overall, primarily among millennials, the word is still out on whether or not this will actually lead to a reduction in transportation emissions.

There are two sides to the argument, according to environmental blog Grist. On the one hand, sure, ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft free people from needing to use cars to get around on a daily basis. On the other, theres some evidence that the popularity and convenience of these unconventional cab services has actually increased the number of cars on the roadsparticularly in dense cities like New York and Chicago, where residents might have previously been more inclined to use public transportation.

Nonetheless, the sharing economy continues to grow, and its not just about cars. The popularity of sites like Airbnb remains strong, and according to a reportby PwC, 72 percent of Americans say theyre likely to participate in a sharing service in the coming two years.

More renewable energy

Though the warming of the planet is ultimately bad news, theres still plenty of indication that the green energy economy will continue to improve, diversify and grow. According to Scientific American, the U.S. Energy Information Administration is expecting renewable energy to be the fastest-growing source of power in the coming years.

More and more consumers are switching to green power within their own homes, if they have the means to do so. The Solar Energies Industry Association reported that the second half of 2015 was the biggest quarter yet for solar power, with nearly 1,400 megawatts of power installed nationwide.

As both individuals and communities look to transition to renewable energy, it will undoubtedly change the energy landscape. Well have to see what other surprises global warming and climate change action will have on consumer behavior in the coming years.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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3 Ways Climate Change Affects How We Spend Money

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