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Two Corinthians Walk Into a Bar….

by FelixHuddleston Posted on January 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is a very short history of Donald Trump and the Bible verses that he likes:

August 26: That’s very personal. You know, when I talk about the Bible it’s very personal. So I don’t want to get into verses, I don’t want to get into—the Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.

September 16: Proverbs, the chapter “never bend to envy.” I’ve had that thing all of my life, where people are bending to envy.

January 18: I asked Jerry, and I asked some of the folks, because I hear this is a major theme right here, but Two Corinthians, right? Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame. Where the spirit of the lord—right? Where the spirit of the lord is, there is liberty. And here there is Liberty College, Liberty University.

See? Trump is willing to study. At first he knew nothing. Then he boned up and kinda sorta named one verse that kinda sorta exists—but not really. Finally he boned up some more and named an actual Bible verse which he quoted accurately. Sure, he had to ask for one, and he had to read it off notes, but still. Progress!

But there’s still one more step: learning how to accurately cite Bible references. In front of a crowd of thousands of Christian students at Liberty University, he talked about “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians.” Here’s what’s weird about that. It’s not just that anyone who’s so much as gone to Sunday School knows that you say “Second Corinthians.” Even if you’d never been to church in your life, you’d know it from watching movies or TV or listening to ministers at weddings and funerals. It’s just standard background knowledge in any culturally Christian country.

Now, nobody with a brain has ever believed that Donald Trump is a Christian in any serious sense. I don’t think he could pass a third-grade test of Bible knowledge. But today’s gaffe, as trivial as it seems, suggests more: that he literally has paid no attention to Christianity at all. In fact, given how hard that is in a country as awash in religious references as the United States, it suggests much more: Donald Trump has spent most of his life actively trying to avoid religion as completely as possible. And yet, apparently evangelicals love him anyway. Go figure.

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Two Corinthians Walk Into a Bar….

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This Bee-Killing Pesticide Is Terrible at Protecting Crops

by RFDPenny790770 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2011, agrichemical giants Monsanto and Bayer CropScience joined forces to sell soybean seeds coated with (among other things) an insecticide of the neonicotinoid family. Neonics are so-called systematic pesticides—when the coated seeds sprout and grow, the resulting plants take up the bug-killing chemical, making them poisonous to crop-chomping pests like aphids. Monsanto rivals Syngenta and DuPont also market neonic-treated soybean seeds.

These products—buoyed by claims that the chemical protects soybean crops from early-season insect pests—have enjoyed great success in the marketplace. Soybeans are the second-most-planted US crop, covering about a quarter of US farmland—and at least a third of US soybean acres are grown with neonic-treated seeds. But two problems haunt this highly lucrative market: 1) The neonic soybean seeds might not do much at all to fight off pests, and 2) they appear to be harming bees and may also hurt other pollinators, birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates.

Doubts about neonic-treated soybean seeds’ effectiveness aren’t new. In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency released a blunt preliminary report finding that “neonicotinoid seed treatments likely provide $0 in benefits” to soybean growers. But the agrichemical industry likes to portray the EPA as an overzealous regulator that relies on questionable data, and it quickly issued a report vigorously disagreeing with the EPA’s assessment.

Now the seed/agrichemical giants will have to open a new front in their battle to convince farmers to continue paying up for neonic-treated soybean seeds. In a recent publication directed to farmers, a coalition of the nation’s most important Midwestern ag-research universities—Iowa State, Kansas State, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, North Dakota State, Michigan State, the University of Minnesota, the University of Missouri, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, South Dakota State, and the University of Wisconsin—argued plainly that “for typical field situations, independent research demonstrates that neonicotinoid seed treatments for soybeans do not provide a consistent return on investment.”

The reason is that neonic-treated soybeans wield the great bulk of their bug-killing power for the first three weeks after the seeds sprout; the major pest that attacks soybean plants, the aphid, doesn’t arrive until much later, when the soybean plants are full-grown. “In other words,” the report states, aphid populations “increase to threshold levels weeks after the short window that neonicotinoid seed treatments protect plants.”

And not only are neonics useless against soybeans’ major field pest, aphids; they may actually boost the fortunes of another important one, the slug, which is “emerging as a key pest” in the soybean belt, according to the report. Pointing to a 2015 study from Penn State researchers, the report notes that slugs aren’t affected by neonics, so they can gobble neonic-treated soy sprouts at will, accumulating the chemical. But when insects called the ground beetle—which has a taste for slugs but not soybean plants—eat the neonic-containing slugs, they tend to die. So slugs transfer the poison from the crops to their natural predator, the ground beetle, and throw the predator balance out of whack, allowing slugs to proliferate. As a result, the Penn State researchers found, neonic seed treatments actually reduce yields in slug-infested fields.

Of course, the most celebrated “non-target” insect potentially affected by neonics is the honeybee. As I reported last week, the EPA recently released an assessment finding that one particular neonic that’s widely used on soybean seeds, imidacloprid, likely harms individual bees and whole bee colonies at levels commonly found in farm fields. That’s because plants from neonic-treated seeds don’t just carry the poison in their leaves and stalks; they also deliver it in bee-attracting nectar and pollen.

While cotton is the imidacloprid-treated crop most likely to hit bees hard, soybeans, too, may pose a threat, the EPA found. The agency couldn’t say for sure, because data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans’ pollen and nectar are “unavailable,” both from Bayer and from independent researchers.

That information gap may be cold comfort for beekeepers, but the agrichemical industry will no doubt seize upon it to argue that its blockbuster chemical is harmless to bees. The rest of us can savor the bitter irony that this widely used pesticide may be more effective at slaying beneficial pollinators than it is at halting crop-chomping pests.

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This Bee-Killing Pesticide Is Terrible at Protecting Crops

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The GOP Undercard Debate Would Have Been Less Terrible If Lindsey Graham Had Been In It

by MarisolM85 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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The lowest-polling GOP presidential candidates—Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina—squared off prior to the main GOP debate Thursday night, trying to answer a very basic question: why are they still in the race? Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was also invited to the undercard debate, but declined to participate if he wasn’t given a spot at the main event. Paul announced that he would instead host a “tele-town hall” on Facebook.

Ahead of Thursday’s debate, the three remaining undercard debaters were polling at about 4.5 percent combined (Santorum was polling at zero), according the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Fiorina came out of the gate with a sharp dig at Hillary Clinton:

The candidate’s responses to question on major issues were more or less predictable: On the economy? Obama has ruined it and pushed jobs overseas. On foreign policy? Obama can’t handle ISIS but they can. Along the way, they managed to sneak in a few zingers.

Fiorina, for instance, took a shot at GOP frontrunner Donald Trump: “Despite Donald Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin, Russia is our adversary.”

In one of the event’s most memorable exchanges, Santorum offered an interesting spin on mass deportations. He described sending the children of undocumented immigrants back to their countries of origin as “gift” that would enable them to improve their home countries. He called this “exporting America” in what can only be described as perhaps the worst study abroad program ever. At another point, Santorum suggested people Google him to see how he once stood up to Hillary Clinton. But you probably want to avoid Googling “Santorum.”

Huckabee kept to his normal tack of decrying Obama’s policies on all fronts, including repeating the mostly false claim that, under the Obama administration, the US navy has shrunk to its lowest level since 1915.

Overall the event seemed flat, and certainly could have used the lovable flourishes of erstwhile GOP candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham.

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The GOP Undercard Debate Would Have Been Less Terrible If Lindsey Graham Had Been In It

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Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

by cazaresighisoaraieftina Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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The chart on the right comes from Heterodox Academy, a group founded a few months ago to promote more ideological diversity on university campuses. What it shows is unsurprising: over the past few decades, university faculties have become almost entirely liberal. And this is for all university faculty. According to HA, humanities and social science faculty are closer to 95 percent liberal.

Why? Paul Krugman thinks it’s because conservatives went nuts starting in the 80s, so nobody with any intelligence and genuine curiosity wants to associate with them anymore. Michael Strain suggests that it might be because faculties actively discriminate against conservative job candidates. This argument has been going on forever, and there are a few basic points of view:

Undergrads, especially in the humanities, are mostly liberal, which means that PhD program fill up with liberals. Conservatives just aren’t interested in the liberal arts these days, so there are very few to choose from when it comes time to hire new faculty.
Being exposed to graduate work in the humanities converts a lot of people to liberalism.
Liberal arts departments consider conservative views inherently racist/sexist/etc. and are loath to hire anyone who promotes conservative views.

Needless to say, all of these interact with each other, and more than one may be right. But here’s what I don’t get: why the endless argument? These all seem like eminently testable hypotheses:

Are undergraduate liberal arts departments predominantly filled with liberal students?
Are conservatives not much interested in the liberal arts these days? Why?
How many conservatives apply to grad programs in the liberal arts? How many are accepted?
How much do views change while in grad school?
How many conservatives end up getting PhDs in the liberal arts?
Of those, how many get tenure-track jobs?

If, say, 95 percent of job candidates are liberal, then there’s probably no discrimination. Conservatives are being hired in proportion to their numbers. If conservatives generally don’t major in the liberal arts as undergrads, then probably PhD programs aren’t discriminating either. Etc. These all seem like fairly answerable questions.

Most likely, there’s a vicious circle involved. As the American right became more conservative while the liberals arts became (say) modestly more liberal, it would make sense if conservatives just didn’t feel like joining up. This naturally produced a more left-leaning liberal arts faculty, rinse and repeat. Eventually you end up at 95 percent.

But why guess? Can’t these questions at least be suggestively answered?

For what it’s worth, I agree that it’s a problem regardless of how it happened. It’s easy for liberals to see the conservative bubble when we talk about Fox News or talk radio, and we immediately understand why it’s bad: it makes people lazy and unwilling to question their basic beliefs. We don’t see this so clearly when it’s our own bubble, but we should. Bubbles are bubbles, and ours are no better than theirs.

And now to end on a griping note: I would be a lot more sympathetic to conservative complaints about the academy if they showed an equal concern about fields that lean heavily conservative (big business, the military, etc.). For some reason, though, that never seems to strike them as a problem. Why?

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Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

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America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

by DemetriusBruns Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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For billions of people around the world, the most immediate threat posed by climate change is at the dinner table, as staple crops face a steadily worsening onslaught of drought, heat waves, and other extreme weather events. The United States certainly isn’t immune to these challenges; for proof, just look at California, where an unprecedented drought has cost the state’s agriculture industry billions.

Still, the conventional thinking among many scientists is that developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—where people are typically hit harder by food price spikes and generally more reliant on agriculture as a primary source of income—are the most vulnerable to food-related climate impacts.

A paper published today in Nature may add a wrinkle to that assumption. Scientists often track the impact that an individual weather disaster has on crops (again, see California), but the new research takes it a step further.

A team of scientists from Canada and the United Kingdom compiled the first-ever global tally of how weather disasters over the past 50 years cut into production of staple cereals. After merging a database of global weather records with a UN record of country-level crop production, the researchers found that, as a rule of thumb, droughts and heat waves typically cut a country’s cereal production by 10 percent. That basically accords with predictions from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s predictions for agricultural vulnerability in the future.

But unexpectedly, the researchers also found that the impacts were 8 to 11 percent more severe in developed countries than in developing ones.

“That was a surprise to us,” said Navin Ramankutty, an agricultural geographer at the University of British Columbia.

Ramankutty said it’s not yet clear why droughts and heat waves tend to hit yields in the United States, Europe, and Australia harder than those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But he suspects it relates to how farmers set their priorities. In developed countries, the emphasis is often on maximizing profit with big monoculture farms that work great in good climates but get trashed when the weather turns sour. Farmers in developing countries, by contrast, may prioritize minimizing their risk, taking a smaller yield in exchange for better resilience.

Of course, these findings don’t mean developing countries are out of harm’s way. They still face major challenges from climate change, since comparatively small yield losses can have an outsized impact on local economies and food security. But Ramankutty says the new research shows that even in the developed world, farmers may be more at risk from climate change than anyone previously realized.

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America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

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Neighbors and Family Recount Chilling Details in Chicago Police Shooting

by ShastaTRQqlvqx Posted on December 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Eyewitness accounts from neighbors appear to confirm a Chicago police officer began shooting into the home of Quintonio Legrier and Bettie Jones from several feet away while standing on the sidewalk. That contradicts the police department’s early account, which suggests one of the officers opened fire in the entryway after Legrier confronted him.

Legrier, a 19-year-old engineering student, and Jones, a 55-year-old mother of five and workers’ rights activist, were shot on Saturday when officers responded to a domestic disturbance call at their home around 4:30 a.m. Jones opened the door when police responded to a call from Legrier’s father.

It was the first fatal Chicago police shooting since the city released video footage of another officer shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times in October 2014. The police department’s handling of that case prompted a Department of Justice investigation into the department’s use of force.

The deaths of Jones and Legrier have put more pressure on local and federal officials. The families of both Legrier and Jones have called on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to resign. Emanuel and Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner have called the shooting “troubling.” Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez has asked the FBI to assist her investigation of the case. And the Department of Justice plans to include the shooting in its probe of the Chicago Police Department. On Wednesday the mayor, who cut short a family vacation to Cuba after learning about the shooting, announced plans for a “major overhaul” of the police department rules on use of force. The changes include a mandate that all department patrol cars be equipped with a Taser and more be officers be trained to use them by June 1, 2016.

According to the Guardian, Legrier’s and Jones’s deaths bring the total number of fatal police shootings this year to more than 1,120.

Shots Fired

Quintonio Legrier’s father says the shooting raises questions about how officers handle suspects who are mentally ill, and he wonders why the officer involved in this case couldn’t have used other methods, such as a Taser, to handle the situation. Quintonio’s mother, Janet Cooksey, disputes that her son had a mental illness.

Quintonio was visiting his father, Antonio Legrier, for Christmas in a home where the first- and second-floor apartments share the same entrance. Bettie Jones lived in the downstairs apartment. Antonio, who says his son has recently struggled with “emotional” issues, called the police so they could help him get his son to the hospital. Police say Quintonio had threatened his father with a bat. But Antonio Legrier says Quintonio had merely banged on his bedroom door angrily, and the family’s lawyer says Antonio did not fear his son was going to hurt him.

Here’s what police say happened next: When officers arrived at the house, they were “confronted by a combative subject.” This resulted “in the discharging of the officer’s weapon,” the police department said.

One officer opened fire, killing both Jones and Quintonio.

The police department said Jones was shot “accidentally,” and it issued its “deepest condolences” to Jones’ family.

Although the early police statement about the incident does not specify where the officers were standing, it suggests that Quintonio may have confronted them in the entryway of the building, which prompted the officer to shoot.

However, family members and other witnesses have said the officer was standing on the sidewalk when he began shooting, which could indicate he was not in immediate danger, as the police account may imply.

New details help support the families’ version of what happened.

Janet Cooksey, Legrier’s mother, told me that the front door to Antonio Legrier’s home is old and squeaks when it opens. She said her son’s father told her that he heard gunshots almost as soon as he heard the door open. (Cooksey does not live in the home).

Bullet holes in the door

Quintonio Legrier’s and Bettie Jones’s residence on the 4700 block of West Erie Street in Chicago Brandon Ellington Patterson

She said Antonio told her that he ran downstairs because he assumed officers were shooting at his son, and that when he got there they started shooting again. She also said there were bullet holes in the door.

Cooksey also said Antonio wasn’t the only person who called police: Quintonio placed a call to them as well, she said.

Quintonio took seven bullet wounds total, Cooksey said, including two in his side and one in his buttocks.

Two neighbors who live next door to Legrier’s house say the officer shot from the sidewalk in front of the home.

Marcos Mercado lives in the house directly to the left of where the shooting occurred. From his living room window, he saw an officer standing on the sidewalk with his gun drawn and then heard gunfire, he told me during an interview at his kitchen table. Marcos did not see the officer pull the trigger, but after shots rang out he saw the officer standing in the same spot still pointing his gun at the house.

Mercado also said he saw another officer with a flashlight “check” in the passageway between Legrier’s home and the house to the right of it.

Mercado said he heard one officer yell for someone to come out of Legrier’s house. When asked how many minutes passed between when the officers arrived and when the shooting began, Mercado said officers began shooting “right away.” He heard shots in rapid succession, he said.

He said he spoke to detectives from the city’s Independent Police Review Authority for 10 minutes the day after the shooting.

I spoke to another neighbor, who lives in the house directly to the right of where the shooting occurred and would only give his first name, DeSean. From his window he saw an officer shoot into the doorway from the sidewalk, he told me.

One officer walked to the front of the house from the back, using a passageway that runs between DeSean’s house and Legrier’s house. Another officer got out of a squad car that was parked in the street, DeSean said. One of the officers walked up the stairs and knocked. Then he ran back to the sidewalk and drew his gun “like he was in position to shoot,” DeSean said.

The officer didn’t say anything when he knocked on the door, DeSean said. Jones opened the door a few minutes later, he recalled.

“When Jones opened that door she was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!'” DeSean said. “Like, ‘Slow down—wait, wait, wait!’ That’s what she meant.” He said there had been 15 or 20 seconds between when Jones opened the door and when the officer opened fire.

“You can see clearly”

DeSean and William, another neighborhood resident who witnessed the aftermath of the shooting, told me the porch was brightly lit, so the officer should have been able to see a woman in the doorway. William said, “There’s nothing dark about it. You can see clearly.”

DeSean said he didn’t see Jones get hit but heard the shots and could see the officer pulling the trigger. He said there were two or three officers at the house when the shooting occurred.

“Right after” the shooting, DeSean says, the officer who shot Legrier and Jones looked into the passage between his and Legrier’s homes and yelled, “Put the gun down! Put the gun down!” But DeSean says he didn’t see anyone in the passageway.

After the shooting, several neighbors came outside. When DeSean looked into Legrier’s house, he says he saw Quintonio laying on top of Jones’ body in the hallway. Two ambulances arrived after five or six minutes, DeSean said and brought Quintonio and Jones out.

Antonio Legrier has filed a wrongful death suit against the city, alleging that authorities have a video of at least part of the incident, and that an officer shot Legrier from 20 to 30 feet away. The Independent Police Review Authority is investigating the shooting.

The name of the officer who fired the gun has not been released.

According to local TV station CBS 2, which cited unnamed sources, the officer is in his 20s and is a former Marine. He entered the police academy in October 2012 and graduated six months later in March 2013, the report says. He was a probationary officer for 18 months after completing training. So at the time of the shooting he had been on patrol as a full-fledged officer for just over a year, according to the report.

The officer has been placed on 30-day administrative duty while the IPRA investigates, in accordance with a new department policy instituted by Interim Police Superintendent John Escalante. The new policy “will ensure separation from field duties while training and fitness for duty requirements can be conducted,” the department said in a statement.

Neither the Chicago Police Department nor lawyers for the Jones and Legrier families could be reached immediately for comment.

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Neighbors and Family Recount Chilling Details in Chicago Police Shooting

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Murder Is Up, But Don’t Blame Ferguson Yet

by FeliciaWalthall Posted on December 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, the news was full of reports about cities in which the murder rate had increased 30, 40, even 50 percent since 2014. Was it the fault of Ferguson, which prompted so much anti-police animus that cops started pulling back, afraid to do their jobs for fear of being the target of angry mobs and the evening news?

That’s a hard question to answer, but the first order of business is to figure out if the murder rate has really gone up in the first place. The FBI won’t have official figures for a long time (they’re still working on 2013), but a couple of months ago the Brennan Center took a crack at this and estimated that the murder rate for all of America’s largest cities was up 11 percent this year. That’s a lot less scary than 50 percent, but it’s still a pretty sizeable increase. Heather Mac Donald is unhappy that liberals are trying to downplay it:

Good policing over the past two decades produced an extraordinary 50% drop in crime. America isn’t going to give all that back in one year. The relevant question: What is the current trend? If this year’s homicide and shooting outbreak continues, those 1990s violent crime levels will return sooner than anyone could have imagined.

….Cops making arrests in urban areas are routinely surrounded by bystanders, who swear at them and interfere with the arrests. The media and many politicians decry as racist law-enforcement tools like pedestrian stops and broken-windows policing—the proven method of stopping major crimes by going after minor ones.

….To acknowledge the Ferguson effect would be tantamount to acknowledging that police matter, especially when the family and other informal social controls break down. Trillions of dollars of welfare spending over the past 50 years failed to protect inner-city residents from rising predation. Only the policing revolution of the 1990s succeeded in curbing urban violence, saving thousands of lives. As the data show, that achievement is now in jeopardy.

First things first: no one thinks that “good policing” is responsible for the massive drop in violent crime over the past two decades. It may be part of the reason, but it’s certainly not the whole reason, or even the main reason. And pedestrian stops and broken windows are the subject of intense controversy. They’re the farthest thing from “proven” you can imagine. This is true whether or not you believe that gasoline lead played a role in the big crime drop of the 1990s. MacDonald is engaging in absurdities when she suggests otherwise.

Nor have “family and other informal social controls” broken down. Not in any way that affects the crime rate, anyway. The evidence against this hypothesis is overwhelming. It needs to die a decent death.

Finally, it’s worth noting that because the number of murders is relatively small, it’s not unusual to see fairly large annual changes. We won’t know for years whether the murder rate really went up 11 percent in 2015, but even if it did, it wouldn’t be that surprising. Between 1985 and 2012, the FBI recorded five years in which the murder rate in America’s largest cities increased or decreased by more than 10 percent.

That said, an 11 percent spike is still substantial. If it’s real and persistent, it deserves attention. No one should pretend that it’s just a “modest” increase or a “small blip.”

My recommendation: Both sides should cool it. Mac Donald is right to be concerned that this year’s increase could be bad news if it marks the beginning of a trend. We should keep a close eye on violent crime data—not just murder rates—over the next year or two. At the same time, liberals are right to be skeptical that the “Ferguson effect” is a long-term problem. Most likely, everyone will either adjust to it or forget about it by this time next year. And both sides should be concerned about finding the right policing balance in an era of ubiquitous cell phones and body cams.

Waiting too long to acknowledge a problem can sometimes be disastrous, but a few months is a pretty short time and murder is a pretty small sample set to draw any firm conclusions from. Everyone should calm down a bit and wait to see what the next year or two bring.

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Murder Is Up, But Don’t Blame Ferguson Yet

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American Politics Is Fueled by Ignorance and Hatred

by JosefaCorin Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Catherine Rampell worries that Lake Wobegon-ness is wrecking America:

To an almost comical degree, Americans consistently evaluated their own personal lives and relationships as higher-quality than those of Americans writ large.

When married respondents were asked whether they believed their own marriage had gotten better or worse over the previous two years, 43 percent said stronger, 49 percent said about the same and only 6 percent said weaker.

But when those same people were asked about U.S. marriages generally, the responses flipped: Just 5 percent said they generally were getting stronger, 40 percent said about the same and 43 percent said weaker.

We see this all over the place, of course. Schools are terrible, but my local school is pretty good. Congress is hopelessly corrupt, but my representative is great. Rampell, however, thinks this is a widespread phenomenon, and it’s responsible for the dysfunction of our political system:

In a country that has become not just polarized, but also atomized; in which we root unwaveringly for our own political “teams” composed of those who look, think, vote and raise children exactly as we do; and in which we treat opposing viewpoints as motivated by malice or stupidity rather than honest disagreement, perhaps it is not so surprising that so many Americans have come down with a serious case of dictator envy, a longing for a political strongman (such as, say, Donald Trump) who will put our neighbors in their place and skirt the pluralistic niceties and nonsense of democracy.

I guess it was inevitable that this piece would somehow end with Donald Trump, since he’s the ultimate mystery to my tribe of hypereducated lefties. Still, Rampell’s point stands without him: if America’s two major tribes think the other tribe is not merely wrong, but dangerous and morally degenerate, democracy gets a lot harder. After all, the underlying prerequisite of democracy isn’t elections, it’s the peaceful transfer of power. But that only happens if both sides consider the other fundamentally legitimate and neither side fears destruction when the other side governs. If you think that Republicans are trying to enslave women’s bodies or that Democrats are secretly in league with Islamic jihadists, that peaceful transfer of power gets harder and harder.

We’re nowhere near to losing it, and the political polarization we feel today isn’t unique in American history. Unfortunately, modern media, both traditional and social, amplifies this polarization. If you watch Fox and MSNBC, you’d barely recognize that they were reporting about the same country. I come across this frequently myself when I hear about some new conservative complaint and find myself completely befuddled. What is that all about? A bit of googling usually provides an answer, and by the time it hits the blog it sounds like I’ve known about it all along. But often I haven’t. It’s been reported widely in B-list conservative outlets, but I’m pretty oblivious to those. Conservatives, however, have been getting increasingly riled up about it for months or years.

I’m perhaps not as worried about this as Rampell. Still, it’s disconcerting to know that there are so many people in both tribes who socialize solely within their own tribe and basically think of those outside it as either laughable or dangerous. It may not be the downfall of the nation, but it’s pretty unhealthy.

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American Politics Is Fueled by Ignorance and Hatred

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"Gay Conversion Therapy" Group in New Jersey to Permanently Shut Down

by StevieRendon65 Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A so-called “gay conversion therapy” group in New Jersey has agreed to permanently close its doors after losing a landmark court battle this summer.

As Mother Jones reported, a jury determined in June that Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, or JONAH, had violated state consumer fraud law by claiming it could help change clients’ sexual orientations from gay to straight. It was the first case in the nation to challenge conversion therapy as consumer fraud.

The plaintiffs—including three of the organization’s former clients—said therapists recommended by JONAH had subjected them to humiliating treatments, including stripping in front of a therapist and reenacting scenes of past sexual abuse during group therapy sessions.

On Friday, Judge Peter F. Bariso Jr. granted a permanent injunction after both sides reached a settlement requiring JONAH to cease operations, permanently dissolve as a corporate entity, and liquidate all its assets.

“The end of JONAH signals that conversion therapy, however packaged, is fraudulent—plain and simple,” David Dinielli, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a statement. The center filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Michael Ferguson, one of the plaintiffs, added, “Gay conversion therapy stole years from my life, and nearly stole my life. My hope is that others can be spared the unneeded harm that comes from the lies the defendants and those like them spread.”

Conversion therapy has been rejected by major health organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, which in 1973 removed homosexuality from the list of disorders in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Last year, a transgender teen committed suicide in Ohio after participating in conversion therapy, inspiring a campaign for a federal ban on the practice. New Jersey, California, and Washington, DC, have laws banning licensed conversion therapists from working with minors.

In a pretrial decision in February, Judge Bariso wrote, “The theory that homosexuality is a disorder is not novel—but like the notion that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it—instead is outdated and refuted.”

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"Gay Conversion Therapy" Group in New Jersey to Permanently Shut Down

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What If Getting a Gun Were as Hard as Getting an Abortion?

by GabrielMichaels Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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After multiple shootings across the country in the past week, including a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 people, a Missouri state lawmaker decided to take a provocative approach toward gun control. State Rep. Stacey Newman, a Democrat, prefiled a bill this week for the next legislative session that, if passed, would subject potential gun buyers to the same rigmarole of restrictions—a 72-hour waiting period, an explanatory video, a doctor meeting, a facility tour, reviews of photographs, and more—that are already imposed on or have been proposed for Missouri women seeking abortions.

From the bill, HB 1397:

Prior to any firearm purchase in this state, a prospective firearm purchaser shall, at least seventy-two hours prior to the initial request to purchase a firearm from a licensed firearm dealer located at least one hundred twenty miles from such purchaser’s legal residence, confer and discuss with a licensed physician the indicators and contraindicators and risk factors, including any physical, psychological, or situational factors, that may arise with the proposed firearm purchase. Such physician shall then evaluate the prospective firearm purchaser for such indicators and contraindicators and risk factors and determine if such firearm purchase would increase such purchaser’s risk of experiencing an adverse physical, emotional, or other health reaction.

The bill also requires gun purchasers to watch a 30-minute video about firearm injuries, to tour an emergency trauma center at an urban hospital on a weekend night, when rates of gun-shot victims are high, and to meet with two families who have experienced gun violence and two local faith leaders who have officiated a funeral recently for a child killed by gun violence.

This symbolic bill is reminiscent of the trend that cropped up several years ago, when legislators across the country filed tongue-in-cheek measures proposing restrictions on vasectomies corresponding to state abortion restrictions. None of those measures passed, and Newman’s bill is also virtually guaranteed to fail in Missouri’s Republican-controlled legislature. Newman’s intent is to highlight the high hurdles to getting an abortion in Missouri relative to the lack of accountability required for buying a gun.

“If we truly insist that Missouri cares about ‘all life’, then we must take immediate steps to address our major cities rising rates of gun violence,'” Newman told St. Louis magazine. “Popular proposals among voters, including universal background checks and restricting weapons from abuser and convicted felons, are consistently ignored each session. Since restrictive policies regarding a constitutionally protected medical procedure are the GOP’s legislative priority each year, it makes sense that their same restrictions apply to those who may commit gun violence.”

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What If Getting a Gun Were as Hard as Getting an Abortion?

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