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50 Years Ago This Week We Started Bombing Vietnam

by NestorMathieu Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The 1960s—that extraordinary decade—is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965! How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era’s signature catastrophe? After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We’ve been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say: “Let’s honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice.”

For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we’re now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt. For today’s typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history. Most of their parents weren’t even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.

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50 Years Ago This Week We Started Bombing Vietnam

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This Train Plowing Through Snow Is Absolutely Astonishing

by BerryKDPPmmpcp Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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There’s a strange corner of YouTube where train-spotters post their conquests in exhaustive detail. It’s one of the weirder YouTube holes I’ve been down in a while. But…oddly comforting. This video—of a Canadian National Railway locomotive making a meal out of snow drifts left by major blizzards in New Brunswick—is like something directly out of Snowpiercer, the 2013 dystopian ice age thriller set in a climate-altered future.

While certainly mesmerizing, there’s an important issue to note that has gone unremarked upon since the video went viral. It’s unclear what precisely the locomotive is carrying, but it’s definitely pulling tankers. Its cargo may very well be oil, given that its destination is St John, New Brunswick, the location of Canada’s biggest oil refinery, the Irving Oil Refinery. That refinery was the destination for the train laden with Bakken oil that derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013. The Lac-Mégantic accident killed 47 people and prompted calls across Canada and the United States for tougher safety standards for the booming oil-by-rail network.

Mark Hallman, director of communications for Canadian National Railway, refused to give specifics about the types of cargo being pulled by the train in the YouTube clip, calling it a “mixed freight” service. But Jayni Foley Hein, an expert on energy and transportation at the Institute for Policy Integrity, says crude is one likely possibility. “Its carrying the type of tankers that generally carry oil, and given its proximity to this refinery, it’s certainly a reasonable prediction,” she said.

Despite the soaring plumes of snow, Hallman told me that the train in the video was “totally safely operated,” adding, “That’s winter in Canada. That’s what we have to deal with.” The railway’s own “Customer Safety Handbook” says that operators should take special care in wintry, snowy conditions: “Many of the service disruptions center on accumulations of snow and ice,” says the handbook. “On the track, snow mostly constitutes a problem in switches, as well as at crossings—so once the snow is cleared, the problem is solved.” In general, winter hits railway lines hard, contracting the tracks and making fractures more likely, according to Canadian National Railway.

A 10-year US Department of Transportation analysis of weather-related train accidents in America, from 1995 to 2005, found that the accidents related to snow and ice, when they did occur, often resulted in dangerous derailments. “During the winter months of December through March, the highest accident numbers arose from preexisting snow and ice conditions such as buildups that cause malfunctioning switches and derailments,” the report found.

After the Lac-Mégantic disaster, both the United States and Canada agreed to get rid of the older and more dangerous versions of the tanker involved in that tragedy, the “DOT-111.” (We covered the cons of this tanker extensively last May.) In mid-January, Canada announced it would take the tankers off the network years sooner than the United States will, putting the two countries at odds over increased safety measures on the deeply integrated system.

The dangers of carrying oil by rail have fueled a key aspect to the ongoing debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. When the US State Department issued its long-awaited environmental-impact statement on the project last year, one of its most significant findings was that if the controversial pipeline wasn’t built, oil-laden rail cars would pick up the slack. “Rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if new pipelines are delayed or not constructed,” it argued. (More recently, falling oil prices have led the EPA to question that line of reasoning.)

NBC recently reported that in America, trains spilled crude oil more often in 2014 than in any year since the government began collecting data in 1975.

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This Train Plowing Through Snow Is Absolutely Astonishing

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Obama: Climate Change Is an "Urgent And Growing Threat" To National Security

by RogerCurry Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama listed climate change alongside international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and infectious disease in a new national security strategy plan released today. The plan called climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security” and also called for the United States to diversify its energy sources to insulate the country from disruptions to foreign fossil fuel markets.

This isn’t the first time the Obama administration has singled out climate as a major national security risk: A Pentagon report in October said global warming has become a short-term priority for strategic military planning. But the issue gets much more airtime in today’s strategy than it did in the administration’s first, issued back in 2010, where it merited just a few passing references. Overall, the document is in line with the more aggressive climate message that has emerged this year from the White House. You can read it below:

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Document Gw 01 (PDF)

Document Gw 01 (Text)

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Obama: Climate Change Is an "Urgent And Growing Threat" To National Security

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Do You Live in a State With Low Vaccination Rates?

by ZenaidaBecerra Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Measles is making a comeback: The extremely contagious and potentially deadly disease was eliminated in the US in 2000, thanks to a highly effective vaccine and laws requiring kids to be vaccinated before starting school. But in recent years, it has become easier for parents to opt out—and vaccination rates are slipping. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a major spike in cases in 2014, and 2015 might be even worse—in just over a month, there have been 102 cases (and counting) reported across 14 states, mostly connected to December’s Disneyland outbreak.

As we reported yesterday, Anne Schuchat, an assistant surgeon general and the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, stressed that measles could get “a foothold in the United States and become endemic again,” if people don’t get vaccinated.

Overall, national vaccination rates seem high: The median rate of coverage for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, administered to most before entry into kindergarten, was 94.7 percent for the 2013-2014 school year. But, as Schuchat points out, the rate is lower in communities where unvaccinated families tend to cluster. In some areas, low rates might have more to do with access to clinics than with beliefs about vaccinations.

“The national estimates hide what’s going on state to state. The state estimates hide what’s going on community to community. And within communities there may be pockets,” said Schuchat. “It’s one thing if you have a year where a number of people are not vaccinating, but year after year in terms of the kids that are exempting, you do start to accumulate.”

Note: This second map has been revised.

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Do You Live in a State With Low Vaccination Rates?

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World Leaders Will Meet This Year to Decide the Fate of Our Planet. They Already Sound Pessimistic.

by Clark36Uxkhmrw Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article first appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Heartbreaking news Wednesday on that whole global warming thing. Two of the leading architects of a major UN agreement on climate, scheduled to be agreed upon this December, are trying to soften expectations. This is particularly disappointing because Paris had previously been billed as the most important negotiations since the failure in Copenhagen in 2009.

Miguel Arias Canete, the climate chief of the European Union, was in Washington this week for talks on climate change with the lead of the US delegation, Todd Stern. He was quoted in the Guardian as saying, “If we have an ongoing process you can not say it is a failure if the mitigation commitments do not reach 2°C.”

Actually, you can. Because keeping climate change to less than 2-degrees Celsius—the arbitrary point at which scientists and world governments have agreed is the start of “dangerous interference with the climate system”—is the entire goal of the UN climate negotiations. That’s it. That’s what the world is fighting for. All of the eggs have been put in that basket.

But wait, there’s more (also from the Guardian):

In Brussels, meanwhile, the UN top climate official, Christiana Figueres, was similarly downplaying expectations, telling reporters the pledges made in the run-up to the Paris meeting later this year will “not get us onto the 2°C pathway.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem very hopeful. I mean, honestly, what is the point of even conducting these talks if your boss says—10 months in advance—that you will fail?

Now, this year’s negotiations probably won’t be a total failure. The Paris climate talks (seriously, click that link, it’s a great explainer) are expected to produce the world’s first global agreement on climate change, with every member country expected to submit domestic targets for reducing greenhouse gases. That’s something to celebrate. Representatives from nearly 200 countries are assembling in Geneva next week to write the draft agreement.

But with Wednesday’s statements, it’s now looking more and more likely that, when taken together, those targets won’t be sufficient to keep global warming to manageable levels.

Instead, the 2015 agreement is looking more and more like a way to peer pressure global laggards (like Canada, Australia, Japan, and, in the past, the United States) from doing the bare minimum on climate. That’s something we ought to be excited about, but incremental progress like this is in no way a substitute for meaningful government action on climate.

It’s too bad we’ve wasted the last two-and-a-half decades since climate change first emerged on the world’s diplomatic radar—the world’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 61 percent since 1990â&#128;&#139;, matching or exceeding projections for the worst-case emissions—but the world can’t sulk in failure forever. Instead, we should use this opportunity to admit that, when it comes to the climate, the UN process is irreparably broken. If we at last write off the UN process, it may help the world finally make progress on climate by instead turning to local, tangible actions that could energize people and bring about real change.

This is further evidence that the action on climate change will shift to what are currently perceived to be radical solutions. Absent meaningful action by governments, it’s up to individuals to demand change: nonviolent direct action and mass protest, a rethinking of capitalism—in short, a revolution in culture and society—are suitable to the job of limiting climate change to levels that don’t threaten entire ecosystems and thus human prosperity. Just because this sort of change is unlikely doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary.

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World Leaders Will Meet This Year to Decide the Fate of Our Planet. They Already Sound Pessimistic.

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California Bill Seeks to Get All Children Vaccinated

by LieseloSteffen Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the heels of an ongoing measles outbreak that has ignited a national debate over childhood vaccinations, California lawmakers introduced a bill on Wednesday seeking to put an end to the use of personal belief exemptions—which allow parents to opt out of vaccinating their children—in the state.

The proposed legislation would essentially require all school children to get vaccinated, unless immunization puts the child’s health at risk.

“We shouldn’t wait for more children to sicken or die before we act,” Rep. Richard Pan (D-Santa Monica) said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Parents are letting us know our current laws are insufficient to protect their kids.”

The current outbreak started in Disneyland and has since spread to 14 states, with at least 102 cases reported, according to the latest report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. California is one of 20 states that allow for such waivers, which public health officials have cited as a primary cause for the recent reemergence of the highly contagious disease. Only 92.3 percent of children in California are vaccinated, and many of the state’s more affluent neighborhoods report even lower rates.

While Gov. Jerry Brown previously signed bills permitting more parental choice on the matter, a spokesperson for the governor indicated he would be open to possible changes.

“The governor believes that vaccinations are profoundly important and a major public health benefit and any bill that reaches his desk will be closely considered,” Evan Westrup said.

Also on Wednesday, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein released a joint statement calling upon California officials to consider tightening the state’s vaccination policies and ending the both personal belief and religious exemptions.

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California Bill Seeks to Get All Children Vaccinated

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Here’s What’s at the Heart of the Crisis in Greece

by MalcolmA33 Posted on January 29, 2015

Mother Jones

If you’re in the market for some interesting commentary on Greece, there have been a couple of good ones recently. The first comes from Paul Krugman, who, among other things, makes a point that often gets missed: Greece is already running a primary surplus. That is, they’ve cut spending enough over the past few years that their budget would be balanced if it weren’t for interest payments on their gigantic debt. What’s more, their primary surplus is slated to rise to 4.5 percent in the future:

If Greece were to adhere totally to the previous terms, over the next five years it would make resource transfers of about 20 percent of one year’s GDP. From the point of view of the creditors, that’s a trivial sum. From the point of the Greeks, however, it’s crucial; the difference between a primary surplus of 4.5 percent of GDP and, say, 1.5 percent of GDP for the Greek economy and the welfare of its citizens is huge. The only reason for the creditors to play hardball would be to make Greece an example, to discourage other debtors from trying to negotiate relief.

In other words, the EU is demanding that Greece not just balance its budget, but run a large surplus that it will mostly send to large countries for whom it’s a trivial sum. For Greece, though, it’s a huge sum, the difference between years of penury and a return to growth. This is at the heart of the conflict between Greece and the EU.

The second commentary comes from Daniel Davies, who makes the point that Greece’s gigantic debt doesn’t really matter as debt. Everyone knows Greece will never be able to pay it back. But if everyone knows this, why are Germany and the rest of the EU so hellbent on refusing to write it off?

Don’t think of the Greek debt burden, either in cash € terms or as a ratio to GDP, as an economic quantity. It basically isn’t an economically meaningful number any more. The purpose of its existence is as a political quantity; it’s part of the means by which control is exercised over the Greek budget by the Eurosystem. The regular rituals of renegotiation of the bailout package, financing of debt maturity peaks and so on, are the way in which the solvent Euroland nations exercise the kind of political control that they feel they need to have if they are going to be fiscally responsible for the bills.

….It is, therefore, totally inimical to the Eurosystem to hold out any hope of the kind of debt writedown that Syriza wants, as opposed to some smaller, cosmetic face value reduction or maturity extension. The entire reason why Syriza wants to get a major up-front reduction in the debt number is to create political space to execute the rest of their program. The debt issue and the political issue are the same issue. Syriza understands this, and so does the Eurosystem.

In other words, Greece doesn’t want to run a large budget surplus. They want to increase government spending in order to dig their way out of their massive economic depression. The rest of the EU wants no such thing. They’re afraid that if they let Greece off the hook, then (a) everyone else will want to be let off the hook, and (b) Greece will go right back to its free-spending ways and soon require another bailout. If the price of that is years of pain and unemployment, so be it.

There’s more at both links, and both are worth reading.

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Here’s What’s at the Heart of the Crisis in Greece

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FAA to Football Fans: Super Bowl Is a No-Drone Zone

by LeannaFraley Posted on January 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a 15-second warning to football fans eager to sneak a bird’s-eye look at this Sunday’s Super Bowl: Leave your drones at home.

The No Drone Zone campaign is part of the FAA’s ongoing efforts to regulate small drones flying over crowded stadiums. The Washington Post reported last November that the aviation agency was investigating a rash of incidents involving drones hovering over major sporting events. A month earlier, the agency extended its ban on airplane flights over large open-air stadiums to include unmanned and remote controlled aircraft.

Drones over sporting events have occasionally raised alarms. In August, a man was detained after he flew a drone that flew over a preseason NFL game between the Carolina Panthers and Kansas City Chiefs. A month later, police questioned a University of Texas student who was flying a drone around Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. Last October, a drone carrying an Albanian flag during a soccer match between Serbia and Albania sparked a riot in Belgrade.

Earlier this month, the FAA issued an advisory reiterating the civil and criminal penalties for pilots who drone the Super Bowl. (Also banned in the airspace above the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona: gliders, parachutes, hang gliders, balloons, crop dusters, model aircraft, and model rockets.) The Goodyear blimp will be allowed.

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FAA to Football Fans: Super Bowl Is a No-Drone Zone

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Obama’s Trip to India Shortened His Life by 6 Hours

by OlenMayorga Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend President Barack Obama was in India for talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on nuclear power, trade, climate change, and other topics. The climate piece was, if not necessarily a letdown, certainly less exciting than Obama’s wide-reaching deal with China in November. Crucially, the China deal included specific carbon emissions reduction targets; those were left out in India over Modi’s (arguably justifiable) insistence that the country be able to aggressively expand its electricity infrastructure to fight poverty.

Instead, India committed to expand its solar power capacity by 33-fold within seven years, and to work closely with the United States in advance of major UN climate talks in Paris in December. (India’s participation will be vital for the summit to produce a meaningful international agreement.)

As Bloomberg‘s Natalie Obiko Pearson noted, Obama got a first-hand taste in the trip of how important it is for India to fuel its growth with clean energy sources. India is already the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the US, and air pollution in many of its cities far exceeds even the infamous levels in Beijing and other Chinese megalopolises.

In fact, Delhi—the capital city where Obama’s meetings took place—has the world’s highest concentration of PM 2.5, according to the UN. These tiny airborne particulates can increase the risk of heart disease and a host of really awful respiratory ailments. The PM 2.5 levels in Delhi are so insanely bad that breathing the air for only a few hours can have irreversible health impacts…even on the leader of the free world.

From Bloomberg:

During Obama’s three-day visit, PM2.5 levels in Delhi have averaged between 76 to 84 micrograms per cubic meter, according to data collected by India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences…Those levels translate roughly into an estimated loss of 2 hours a day in life expectancy, said David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge, who specializes in quantifying risk in a way that is understandable to the public.

Obama was there for three days, so that’s six hours off his life. That is profoundly terrifying. It also underscores how, for developing countries, the need to stem pollution from power plants is about much more than solving the long-term problem of global warming. It’s about addressing an urgent pubic health crisis.

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Obama’s Trip to India Shortened His Life by 6 Hours

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Future President Ben Carson Wrote 6 Books. We Read Them So You Don’t Have To.

by RosalinPigott Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson rallied Republicans at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, stirring up speculation once more that the conservative activist will seek his party’s presidential nomination next year. Carson has never run for office and only recently registered as a Republican, but as the author of six books over more than two decades, he does have a considerable paper trail—and it’s starting to get him into trouble.

In his 1992 book Think Big, for instance, Carson proposed a national catastrophic health care plan modeled on federal disaster insurance, which would be funded by a 10-percent tax on insurance companies. He also proposed re-thinking best practices concerning end-of-life care, advocating for a “national discussion that would help us all rethink our culture’s mind-set about death, dying, and terminal illness”—similar to the provisions of the Affordable Care Act that conservatives now dismiss as “death panels.” (A Carson spokesman told BuzzFeed last week that the health care proposal is “as relevant to his view today as our current military action in Afghanistan is compared to our military strategy in Afghanistan two decades ago.”)

Although filled with inspiring stories of medical miracles and his own rough-and-tumble roots, Carson’s books also reflect the views of a social-values warrior whose anti-gay comments recently caused him to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins University, his longtime employer. A sampling:

On intelligent design (from Take the Risk):

From what I know (and all we don’t know) about biology, I find it as hard to accept the claims of evolution as it is to think that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could somehow assemble a fully equipped and flight-ready 747. You could blow a billion hurricanes through a trillion junkyards over infinite periods of time, and I don’t think you’d get one aerodynamic wing, let alone an entire jumbo jet complete with complex connections for a jet-propulsion system, a radar system, a fuel-injection system, an exhaust system, a ventilation system, control systems, electronic systems, plus backup systems for all of those, and so much more. There’s simply not enough time in eternity for that to happen. Which is why not one of us has ever doubted that a 747, by its very existence, gives convincing evidence of someone’s intelligent design.

On the failing of the fossil record (from Take the Risk):

For me, the plausibility of evolution is further strained by Darwin’s assertion that within fifty to one hundred years of his time, scientists would become geologically sophisticated enough to find the fossil remains of the entire evolutionary tree in an unequivocal step-by-step progression of life from amoeba to man—including all of the intermediate species.

Of course that was 150 years ago, and there is still no such evidence. It’s just not there. But when you bring that up to the proponents of Darwinism, the best explanation they can come up with is “Well…uh…it’s lost!” Here again I find it requires too much faith for me to believe that explanation given all the fossils we have found without any fossilized evidence of the direct, step-by-step evolutionary progression from simple to complex organisms or from one species to another species. Shrugging and saying, “Well, it was mysteriously lost, and we’ll probably never find it,” doesn’t seem like a particularly satisfying, objective, or scientific response. But what’s even harder for me to swallow is how so many people who can’t explain it are still willing to claim that evolution is not theory but fact, at the same time insisting anyone who wants to consider or discuss creationism as a possibility cannot be a real scientist.

On abortion (from America the Beautiful):

This situation perhaps crystallizes one of the major moral dilemmas we face in American society today: Does a woman have the right to terminate another human life because it is encased in her body? Does ownership convey absolute power of life and death over the owned subject? If it does, then NFL quarterback Michael Vick was unfairly imprisoned for torturing and killing dogs in Atlanta.

On gay parents (from The Big Picture):

Recently a homosexual couple brought a child in to be examined on one of our neurosurgical clinical days. During lunch, after the couple had left, one of my fellow staff members commented favorably on the couple’s obvious love and commitment to the child. He said to me, “I know you don’t approve of homosexual relationships and wouldn’t consider their home a healthy atmosphere in which to raise a child. But I was impressed by that couple. I think their sexual orientation is their business. Think what you want, but it’s just your opinion.”

My response wasn’t nearly that politically correct. “Excuse me, but I beg to differ,” I said. “How I feel and what I think isn’t just my opinion. God in his Word says very clearly that he considers homosexual acts to be an ‘abomination.'”

On how gay marriage brought down the Roman Empire (from America the Beautiful):

I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.

On WashingtonRedacted owner Dan Snyder (from One Nation):

On the other hand, many of the greatest achievers in our society never finished college. That includes Bill Gates Jr., Steve Jobs, and Dan Snyder, who is the owner of the Washington NFL franchise.

(Carson elsewhere defended Snyder’s refusal to change his team’s name and called the oft-criticized owner “far from the demonic characterization seen in the gullible press that allows itself to be manipulated by those wishing to bring about fundamental change in America.”)

On Independence Day (from Think Big):

I do not get to see many movies, but when I watched the video of Independence Day with my sons, I was struck by the portrayal of the resistance efforts mounted against the alien invaders from outer space. The frail and arbitrary distinctions so often made between various segments of society, even between different countries and ideologies, instantly melted away as the people of the entire world focused not on their differences but upon a common threat and the common goal uniting them—the protection of the planet from alien invaders.

Unlike some of his fellow candidates, though, Carson has made little effort to sugar-coat his most polarizing views. Even before he revealed any political ambitions, he’d moonlighted as a traveling Creationism advocate, giving speeches on the subject and even debating skeptic Richard Dawkins on evolution in 2006:

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Future President Ben Carson Wrote 6 Books. We Read Them So You Don’t Have To.

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