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Is Donald Trump Setting Up the GOP for his Biggest Prank Yet?

by KerrieMcCabe Posted on September 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Putting to rest GOP concerns about a possible independent run by reality television tycoon Donald Trump, Republican party insiders say that the frontrunner in their presidential contest has agreed to sign a loyalty pledge, promising to back the party’s eventual nominee and not mount an outside effort.

The benefit for Trump is that it removes a line of GOP attack against him. The move signals he is a serious candidate who plans to stay in the race and is not campaigning on a lark. But is Trump the deal-maker pulling a fast one? After all, the actual pledge looks neither legal nor binding.

If there’s one guy who knows about how to escape from or alter a contract, it’s Trump. He has sued many people on assorted grounds, attempting to hold others liable for questioning his wealth, for insulting a building that he considered building (but didn’t), and for allowing airplanes to be loud. (That’s just a partial list.) Since he announced his candidacy, Trump has lost a number of business partners, and he has sued most of them. He sued celebrity chef Jose Andres for $10 million after Andres, an immigrant who recently became a US citizen, pulled out of a plan to build a restaurant in Trump’s new Washington, D.C. hotel. Trump also launched a $500 million lawsuit against Univision for dropping the Miss Universe pageant.

And watch out, GOP; the number of successful lawsuits against Trump for breaching contract are surprisingly few. In 2013, an 87-year-old Illinois woman accused Trump of making false promises concerning investment possibilities regarding a Chicago condo tower he was developing. During his testimony, Trump seemed to enjoy the contentious exchanges with the plaintiff’s attorney and deftly sidestepped demands for information about the construction of the building. According to the Chicago Tribune:

“(The judge) told the chatty Trump to narrow his responses and stick to the questions asked of him. She told (the plaintiff’s attorney) to simplify his questions about the complicated condo deal at the heart of the dispute.

“I’m going to give you both time to catch your breath,” the judge said. “… Do you think the jury likes this? If you do, I can tell you they don’t.”

Over the two days of testimony, Trump dodged and weaved, trying to distance himself from specific knowledge of the condo development plans, often trailing off into lengthy observations about his many hotels. Trump also took every opportunity he could to tell the jury that a clause in the contract allowed him to change plans and that (the plaintiff) had asked for that right to be removed. Yet her request was refused, and she bought two condos anyway, he said.

“And then she sued me! Unbelievable!” he said, his voice rising as he lifted his arms and grimaced in a moment reflective of the Trump the nation has come to know from his network TV reality show.”

Trump’s attorneys argued that the woman was actually a sophisticated investor and should have known that Trump might change the terms of the agreement. He won.

Republicans ought to remember that during the 1992 presidential contest, billionaire H. Ross Perot, after ending an independent bid, said he was out of the race, but then he changed his mind shortly before the election in October. Perot never garnered enough support to have a shot at winning, but he drew 19 percent of the general election vote, and many analysts believed this assured Bill Clinton’s defeat of President George H.W. Bush.

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Is Donald Trump Setting Up the GOP for his Biggest Prank Yet?

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Dear Twitter: There’s No Need to Piss Anyone Off. Why Not Give Us Two Kinds of Timelines?

by SimonHahnzffz Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Twitter is getting a new CEO, so it must be time for some bold new directions. But what should Twitter do? Here’s a suggestion that I’ve read at least half a dozen times in the past couple of days:

Right now, Twitter displays tweets in strict reverse chronological order, but Chris Sacca encourages Twitter to relax this assumption. Instead, when a user logs in, the platform should show a selection of the most interesting and insightful tweets that would have appeared on the user’s timeline since the last check-in.

The counterargument here is that a more accessible version of Twitter already exists. It’s called Facebook, and it’s wildly popular. The danger is that aping Facebook might alienate existing users more quickly than it attracts new ones.

I totally get this. I only follow 200 people on Twitter, and even at that it’s like a firehose. All I can do is dip into it whenever it happens to cross my mind. This means that once an hour or so I see 10 or 20 random tweets, and then go back to whatever I was doing. I almost certainly miss lots of stuff I’d be interested in.

At the same time, chronological order is pretty handy if you’re having a conversation, or some kind of news is breaking. I wouldn’t want to give that up.

But why should I? Is there really any technological barrier to having both? I’d love to toggle back and forth. Maybe I’d take a look at the algorithmic feed once an hour to see if I’ve missed anything important, and then switch to the chronological feed if something was going on or if I just felt like randomly dipping in to the firehose. Sometimes random is good, after all. It keeps you out of a rut.

So….what’s the deal here? Why can’t we have both?

UPDATE: Atrios comments here. FWIW, I blame Apple.

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Dear Twitter: There’s No Need to Piss Anyone Off. Why Not Give Us Two Kinds of Timelines?

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Ringling Bros. Announces It’s Finally Ending Elephant Acts

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey said it will end the use of elephant acts by 2018—a move that follows decades of mounting criticism and public concern over the show’s abusive treatment of the animals. Ringling’s parent company, Feld Entertainment, cited a “mood shift” experienced by circus-goers who have grown “uncomfortable with us touring with elephants” for the decision.

President Kenneth Feld also said local legislation barring certain circus practices, such as the use of bullhooks, made it increasingly difficult for the company to continue including elephants in its performances. “This decision was not easy, but it is in the best interest of our company, our elephants and our customers,” he said in a statement.

In 2011, Mother Jones published an explosive, yearlong investigation looking into Ringling’s treatment of elephants, including the regular employment of electric shocks and whippings to control them:

Several of the beatings targeted Nicole, a twentysomething elephant named after Kenneth Feld’s eldest daughter. Sweet-natured but clumsy, Nicole would frequently miss her cues to climb atop a tub and place her feet on the elephant next to her, Stechcon said in his videotaped statement. “I always rooted for her, ‘Come on, Nicole, get up,'” he said. “But we left the show, brought the animals back to their area, and…we took the headpieces off, and as I was hanging them up, I heard the most horrible noise, just whack, whack, whack. I mean, really hard. It’s hard to describe the noise. Like a baseball bat or something striking something not—not soft, and not hard…I turned around to look, and this guy was hitting her so fast and so hard with the ankus, and sometimes he would take both hands and just really knock her, and he was just doing that. And I was, like, I couldn’t believe it.”

The investigation also exposed that Feld Entertainment had spent millions of dollars on PR campaigns to hide such abuse from the public and fend off lawsuits:

It was part of a multimillion-dollar spy operation run out of Feld headquarters to thwart and besmirch animal rights groups and others on the company’s enemies list, according to a stunning Salon piece by Jeff Stein. Feld had even hired Clair George—the CIA’s head of covert operations under President Reagan until his conviction for perjury in the Iran-Contra scandal. (George, who died in August, received a pardon from President George H.W. Bush.)

Thursday’s announcement to phase out the elephants, which have been a staple for the Ringling brand for more than a century, has been met with praise from animal rights activists. Feld Entertainment said the elephants will be transitioned to the company’s elephant conservation center in Florida.

For more, read our in-depth investigation here.

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Ringling Bros. Announces It’s Finally Ending Elephant Acts

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Some Llamas Escaped and Went on a High-Speed Chase and It Was Amazing

by PattiFuentes Posted on February 26, 2015

Mother Jones

Llamas! Arizona! Internet!

This is a recipe for delight!

Anyway, I don’t know any details about this story other than llamas escaped (presumably from some sort of pen?) in Arizona and then they ran free and a chase began and the world was caught up in it, man, and it was like the ’60s in Europe and people were riding Vespas and falling in love and hair was blowing in the wind and hot people were wearing leather jackets and berets and some were smoking to signify their rebellious nature and everyone was singing rock and roll and saying “Viva la llama!”

Okay, a lot of that didn’t happen but the llamas did escape and there was a chase and it was amazing. Then they were caught.

Watch the entire wonderful epic below:

Bye bye Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to levee

but the levee was dry

and good ol’ boys were drinking

whiskey and rye, singing

“they caught the llamas.”

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Some Llamas Escaped and Went on a High-Speed Chase and It Was Amazing

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"Be a Man." What Does That Even Mean?

by OliviaBromby Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Man up! Grow a pair! Don’t be a pussy! That’s the message boys still get from coaches and peers, movies and video games, and all too often their own fathers. It’s the message those fathers grew up with, too.

In her last documentary, Miss Representation, filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom looked at how the mainstream media perpetuates harmful female stereotypes. Her latest, The Mask You Live In, which premieres at Sundance 2015 this week, tackles a topic that has received far less attention: our culture’s warped perception of masculinity and the damage it inflicts on boys and men—and also on women, whose “feminine” characteristics (empathy, openness, etc.) are seen by men as traits to be avoided.

The Representation Project

A thought-provoking film that connects the dots between masculinity and behaviors ranging from materialism to sexual violence, Mask features characters tormented by our limited definitions of manhood. We meet the bullied and the self-destructive, kids who felt compelled to prove their masculinity through sports and those who turned to drugs to numb the inner pain they couldn’t talk about. One young man describes, with regret, how he’d rejected a good friend the other kids perceived as effeminate.

Their stories are framed by commentary from experts—none more compelling than former NFL defensive lineman and high school football coach Joe Ehrmann, whose own dad took him aside at an early age and told him it was time he stop showing his emotions and start learning to dominate others. Ehrmann was traumatized. And he spent much of his youth trying to live up to his father’s expectations. “I’d ask every man to think about what age they were, what was the context, when someone told you to be a man,” he drawls. “That’s one of the most destructive phrases in this culture.” We also meet enlightened men who are trying to break the cycle by mentoring boys or building close relationships with their own sons.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom The Representation Project

Newsom herself is the eldest of four sisters, but with a Stanford MBA, a father in finance, and a husband (California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom) in politics, she’s encountered plenty of alpha males who measure their manhood in money and power. When she toured for Miss Representation, pregnant with a son, audiences would ask, “What about our boys?” and cite social ills—anti-social behavior, dropping out, suicide—that affect males disproportionately. “It was really important to me,” she told me, “that I could nurture a son who could be true to his authentic self, who wouldn’t always feel like he had to prove his masculinity. There’s so much loneliness, pain, and suffering when one is pretending to be someone that they’re not.”

One film won’t solve the problem, clearly, but Newsom—whose nonprofit, The Representation Project, works to amplify the impact of her films—hopes it will at least provoke some soul-searching. The goal, she says, is “to open up the conversation and enable men and boys to put words to what they’ve been feeling, and remind them that there are so many positive ways to be a man—that they don’t have to conform to an extreme stereotype, especially one that doesn’t bring them joy and satisfaction in life.”

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"Be a Man." What Does That Even Mean?

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Facts Are Useless Things — Politically Speaking

by RaymundHuggins Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jared Bernstein thinks it makes more sense to push for an increase in the gasoline tax than to try to enact a full-blown carbon tax. But he admits the point is moot: Republicans aren’t going to give either one the slightest consideration:

Yet here again, the action is sub-national, and some states have moved on this. As with all those state minimum wages, this creates a useful natural experiment wherein we can collect data on the impact of these state gas tax increases on their economies, budgets, and residents’ incomes. That way, if facts should once again matter, we’ll have some evidence as to the actual impact versus the ideologically inspired cartoon impact.

Damn! Did I miss out on the period in American history when facts used to matter? I’m bummed. Those must have been interesting times.

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Facts Are Useless Things — Politically Speaking

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Dead elephants, plagues, and rats: Why the sixth extinction is bad for you and everyone you know

by WWSMerriashub Posted on July 25, 2014

Exctinction VI: This time it’s personal

Dead elephants, plagues, and rats: Why the sixth extinction is bad for you and everyone you know

By

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Hey, remember the dinosaurs? Yeah, neither. All it took was one massive asteroid, and all the dinos were wiped off the face of the planet. Well, there’s a new asteroid in town: us.

New research published in the journal Science lays out the scope of the destruction we’ve wrought — and suggests that it’s going to come back to bite us. Not only will the so-called sixth extinction make that wildlife safari you’ve always wanted to take a lot less interesting, it could increase disease and make it even harder to feed our own ever-growing population. Happy weekend!

Similar to previous extinction events, the large, cute animals (like elephants and polar bears) are disappearing the fastest: since 1500, more than 320 land-based vertebrates have gone extinct. Which isn’t just bad news for wildlife junkies; their loss translates into a shift in the whole ecosystem. Scientists found that areas in which the big guys disappeared quickly became infested with rodents – who bring all of their disease-carrying parasites with them.

“Where human density is high, you get high rates of defaunation, high incidence of rodents, and thus high levels of pathogens, which increases the risks of disease transmission,” lead author Rodolfo Dirzo says. “Who would have thought that just defaunation would have all these dramatic consequences? But it can be a viscious cycle.”

The sixth extinction also means bad news for those critters that we’re less likely to fawn over, but we’ll probably still miss them when they’re gone. As the human population has doubled since 1979, the number of invertebrate animals (such as insects) has decreased by 45 percent. You might be used to thinking of bugs as unwanted pests, but they do actually help us out in some crucial ways. Like, say, eating. We rely on insects to pollinate about three-quarters of the world’s food crops.

So if you’re not kind of person that’s into animals, so be it. But if you’re the kind of person that enjoys, well, living? Turns out, you could benefit from the animals as much as they could benefit from you.


Source
Stanford biologist warns of early stages of Earth’s 6th mass extinction event, Stanford News Service

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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BP whines some more about how rough life is

by Vladyslava7u1 Posted on August 13, 2013

BP whines some more about how rough life is

By John Upton

Not that big a deal, really.

BP killed 11 workers when the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up, and then it obstructed government investigators. That’s not editorializing — the company pled guilty to manslaughter and obstruction charges. Since you can’t imprison a corporation, it was punished in other ways. One of those punishments was a temporary ban on getting new federal contracts.

Never one to miss an opportunity to publicly whine about how unfair the world is for an explosion-prone petrochemical giant, BP sued the U.S. government on Monday over the suspension, arguing in court that it is arbitrary, capricious, and “an abuse of discretion.” From Fuel Fix:

BP … wants a judge to order the EPA to lift the suspension and allow BP to bid for and secure new government contracts.

The suspension, called a debarment, affects only new federal contracts, not existing ones. Because of it, however, BP has lost out on potentially billions of dollars of business with the U.S. government.

Among other things, the company was ineligible for new contracts worth up to $1.9 billion to provide fuel to the government this year.

Our hearts are just bleeding.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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