Mother Jones
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This is perfect and true and sad and it made me sad.
People are losing their shit over Patricia Arquette saying that women deserve equal rights. Like this is how low we are right now.
— Hemal Jhaveri (@hemjhaveri)
This article:
Mother Jones
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“To every woman who gave birth to every tax payer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”
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Patricia Arquette Just Told Hollywood Exactly What It Needed To Hear
Mother Jones
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On Sunday, a former CBS correspondent spoke to CNN’s Reliable Sources to refute Bill O’Reilly’s claims he reported in a “war zone” during the Falklands war–the subject of a Mother Jones investigation published last Thursday. CNN’s Brian Stelter also reported that he has talked to several other former CBS News journalists who disputed O’Reilly’s account.
“I don’t know of any American foreign correspondent who had a weapon pointed at him,” Engberg told Stelter. “I didn’t hear any gunfire. And not only did I not hear any gunfire, as I say, I didn’t hear any sirens.”
On the show, Stelter played a video of O’Reilly claiming he witnessed Argentine soldiers gunning down civilians at a protest he covered–a video that echoes footage that the Mother Jones article included. Yet Engberg and other correspondents who were in Buenos Aires and who covered the same protest say no such thing happened.
In a Facebook post on Friday, Engberg said the Fox New host largely fabricated his account of his stint in Argentina. “It was not a war zone or even close,” Engberg wrote. “It was an ‘expense account zone.'” O’Reilly has since slammed his ex-colleague, saying Engberg “never left the hotel.”
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Former CBS Colleagues Refute Bill O’Reilly’s "Combat" Reporting Claims
Mother Jones
On Thursday, Mother Jones published an article by Daniel Schulman and me documenting how Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has mischaracterized his wartime reporting experience. It noted that he has repeatedly stated that during his short stint as a CBS correspondent in the 1980s, he was in the “war zone” during the Falklands war between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982. He once claimed he had heroically rescued his cameraman in “a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands,” while being chased by army soldiers. Yet no American journalist reached the war zone in the Falkland Islands during this conflict. O’Reilly and his colleagues covered the war from Buenos Aires, which was 1,200 miles from the fighting.
O’Reilly responded to the story by launching a slew of personal invective. He did not respond to the details of the story. Instead, he called me a “liar,” a “left-wing assassin,” and a “despicable guttersnipe.” He said that I deserve “to be in the kill zone.” (You can read one of my responses here.) And in his show-opening “Talking Points memo” monologue on Friday evening, he continued the name-calling.
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Mother Jones
This week, representatives from the state-level agencies that manage electric grids met in Washington, DC, for a collective freak-out about President Barack Obama’s flagship climate policy. The Clean Power Plan, as it’s called, aims to slash the nation’s carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030. It would require every state to reduce the carbon “intensity” of its power sector—that is, how much greenhouse gas is emitted for every unit of electricity produced.
There’s a unique reduction target for every state, and a likewise diverse array of things for state regulators to hate: They argue the plan is a gross overreach of federal authority; that it will bankrupt utility companies, drive up monthly bills for ratepayers, and lead to power shortages; that states won’t be adequately credited for clean-energy steps they’ve already taken; and that the deadlines for compliance are just downright impossible to meet. And coal companies are justifiably worried that the plan could kill their business.
More than a dozen states (mostly coal-dependent states in the South, which could be hit hardest by the rules) are already raising hell in what’s shaping up to be the environmental version of state-level challenges to Obamacare. As our friend David Roberts at Grist highlighted this week, a number of states have joined a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. And across the country in those states and others, bills are cropping up that could make it hard or impossible for individual states to meet their mandated carbon targets. The idea is effectively to stonewall the EPA and hope the regulations get killed in court.
The most recent battle is playing out this week in Virginia, where a state representative with ties to the coal industry wants to make it more difficult for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to comply with the president’s climate goals.
First, a little background: The nation’s first anti-EPA bill came early last year in Kentucky, before the Clean Power Plan was even released. The proposed EPA rule would require Kentucky to cut its power-sector carbon emissions roughly 35 percent by 2030. That’s bad news for the coal industry, which supplies more than nine-tenths of the state’s power. So using a model bill developed by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (which has deep ties to the coal industry), Kentucky legislators passed a law that essentially prevents the state from complying with the Clean Power Plan. The new law bars the state from adopting any implementation plan that includes renewable energy or energy efficiency, or that encourages power plants to switch from coal to natural gas. With those restrictions, the EPA goal does indeed seem unreasonable; the state’s top climate official recently told Inside Climate News that he has no idea how to meet the EPA’s demands and stay within state law.
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How Coal-Loving States Are Waging War on Obama’s New Climate Rules
Mother Jones
DISC 2, TRACK 2
“Offering”
From John Coltrane’s Offering: Live at Temple University
IMPULSE!/RESONANCE
Liner notes: Sandwiched between sprawling, 20-minute-plus band epics, this hypnotic four-minute solo meditation finds the saxophonist at his gentle best.
Behind the music: Recorded Nov. 11, 1966, less than a year before his death, the oft-bootlegged concert is legendary for Coltrane’s unexpected chanting and chest-beating, all in the name of spiritual pursuit.
Check it out if you like: Saxophone colossi such as Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler and Wayne Shorter.
From:
Mother Jones
The quilts are back! This is Hopper peering down from the second story hallway and surveying her domain from between the quilts hanging over the railing. Amusingly, Hilbert saw her and immediately started fussing and mewling, trying to figure out to get up to her. He jumped on a bench, but that wasn’t high enough. He put his paws up on the wall, but plainly couldn’t climb up it. Finally, after about a minute of this nonsense, a neuron fired somewhere and he remembered that all he had to do was run up the stairs. So he did, and then immediately lost interest in whatever it was he thought he wanted. But it was touch and go there for a while.
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Mother Jones
The world, as a whole, is getting less hungry. Over the past two decades, the levels of undernutrition in developing countries from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia have declined. Unfortunately, so has the quality of our diets.
That’s the main takeaway of a study published by The Lancet Global Health on Wednesday that looked at the dietary patterns across 187 countries—comprising about 89 percent of the global population—in 1990 and 2010. Check out the maps below, which break down eating habits by country on a scale of green (the healthiest) to red (the unhealthiest). The first map shows which countries are eating the most healthy foods like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and milk (see, for example, Chad, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Turkey). The second map shows which countries are eating the most unhealthy foods that are high in fat and salt, as well as sugary drinks, unprocessed red meats and processed meats (see the United States, Russia, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Brazil, among others).
Fumiaki Imamura et al / The Lancet Global Health
The next three maps show changes in dietary patterns from 1990 to 2010, again on a color scale, with green countries making healthy changes and red countries making unhealthy changes. Russia, Mongolia, Laos, and Paraguay are outpacing many other countries with their increase in nutritious foods, as the top map shows, while the second map reveals that Uganda, Vietnam, and Armenia are quickly finding a taste for fatty or sugary treats. And when it comes to overall dietary changes since 2010, shown in the last map, it seems that China, Angola, and Congo aren’t doing very well.
Fumiaki Imamura et al / The Lancet Global Health
A team of researchers made these maps by evaluating hundreds of national surveys about diets. Looking at the big picture, they found that people around the world are, on average, eating more nutritious foods than they did 20 years ago, but they’re also digging into more junk—much more junk. “Consumption of healthier foods and nutrients has modestly increased during the past two decades; however, consumption of unhealthy foods and nutrients has increased to a greater extent,” the researchers explained.
On average, older adults are eating better than younger adults, while women are eating better than men. There are also major differences regionally, depending on countries’ income levels. While people in the United States, Canada and western Europe are among the worst in the world for high consumption of unhealthy food, they’re eating less junk than they used to, which helps explain reductions in blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and cardiovascular mortality in these countries. By comparison, people in many developing countries eat relatively healthy diets, but they’re eating more junk than they did in the past.
These socioeconomic variations have ramifications for public health. International food programs usually focus on fighting hunger, but in nearly every region of the world, the researchers said, diet-related health problems due to undernutrition are now less common than those due to non-communicable chronic diseases, and the food we eat plays a role in causing many of these diseases. By 2020, nearly three-quarters of all deaths globally will be attributable to non-communicable chronic diseases, they said, adding that without major changes to diet quality, these diseases and obesity will become much more common among the world’s poor.
It’s unclear exactly why low-income countries are eating more unhealthy foods, but the reasons are probably varied. In northwest sub-Saharan Africa, the researchers said, food prices have increased and diet quality has worsened, perhaps due to economic liberalization and marketing of unhealthy foods to the region’s wealthiest people. Violent conflicts might also play a role in certain countries, by hindering food production and trade. “Our work should help to link the possible economic and political factors to actual diets,” they wrote, “and to assess determinants of the potential divergence in consumption of healthy foods in the poorest nations in the world.”
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Mother Jones
Over at the mothership, David Corn and Daniel Schulman report that Bill O’Reilly might have a problem with the truth that’s surprisingly similar to Brian Williams’. Basically, they both seem to have a habit of exaggerating their war-reporting prowess. In Williams’ case, it was about a helicopter during the Iraq War. In O’Reilly’s case, he’s repeatedly said that he was “in a war zone in Argentina” during the Falklands war, but in fact he was never anywhere near the actual war. He was a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires:
O’Reilly did see some action in Argentina— just not war action. He writes in The No Spin Zone that shortly after he hit Buenos Aires—where CBS News had set up a large bureau in the Sheraton hotel—thousands of Argentines took to the streets, angry at the military junta for having yielded to the Brits.
As he tells it in his book, O’Reilly, then 32 years old, raced to cover the event: “A major riot ensued and many were killed. I was right in the middle of it and nearly died of a heart attack when a soldier, standing about ten feet away, pointed his automatic weapon directly at my head.” A television cameraman was trampled, journalists were banged up, and O’Reilly and others were teargassed. “After a couple of hours of this pandemonium,” he recalls, “I managed to make it back to the Sheraton with the best news footage I have ever seen. This was major violence up close and personal, and it was an important international story.”
Now, even this might be a bit of an exaggeration—click the link for details—but put that aside for the moment. It’s pretty obvious that a protest, even a violent protest, isn’t a war zone or anything close to it. O’Reilly can bob and weave all he wants, but no one is going to buy the idea that covering a protest in Buenos Aires is anything like reporting from a war zone.
Nonetheless, I suspect we’re about to witness an interesting phenomenon. In the case of Brian Williams, NBC caved in to pressure pretty quickly and suspended him for six months. It’s possible that his career is over. In O’Reilly’s case, the response so far has been (a) silence from Fox News and (b) a torrent of insults and abuse from O’Reilly. And my guess is that it will work. The Williams case generated a ton of commentary. So far, the O’Reilly case has generated very little. As long as both Fox and O’Reilly stonewall, it will probably stay that way. It will be a momentary squall and then it will blow over.
Stonewalling often works. We’re about to find out if it will work here.
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Mother Jones
Four years ago, Michele Bachmann slammed Rick Perry—then the governor of Texas—for his executive order mandating HPV vaccinations. “I’m a mom of three children,” Bachmann said during a GOP presidential debate. “And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong.”
Bachmann, who at the time was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, expanded on her allegations the next day. “I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Fla., after the debate,” she said on the Today show. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects.” (Watch it above.)
Bachmann’s suggestion that the HPV vaccine is dangerous was completely false. “There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement,” explained the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The 2016 campaign is just around the corner, and even though the Iowa caucuses are nearly a year away, we are already being inundated with dubious claims from potential candidates. Frequently, those claims touch upon issues related to science. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve heard Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioning vaccine safety, potential candidate Ben Carson suggesting immigration could be spreading disease, and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) claiming that global temperature data had been “falsified.”
Enter Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which operates the nonpartisan Factcheck.org. Founded in 2003, Factcheck was one of the first websites devoted to refuting misleading assertions about US politics. Last month, Factcheck launched Scicheck, a new project that evaluates the scientific claims made by politicians. In just a few weeks, Scicheck has countered inaccurate statements about issues ranging from climate change to the economic impact of the Human Genome Project.
On this weeks’ episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, I asked Jamieson what inspired her organization to focus on scientific issues. She credits Bachmann.
“When Michele Bachmann in the last election made an allegation about the effects of…a vaccine, in public space on national television…the journalists in the real context didn’t know how to respond to the statement as clearly as they ought to,” explains Jamieson. “The time to contextualize is immediately. That should have been shot down immediately.”
So when the Stanton Foundation approached Factcheck to offer funding for a new initiative, the group decided that what it needed to do was hire “real science journalists” with the expertise to refute false claims and to get those corrections “into the bloodstream of journalism more quickly,” says Jamieson. “That’s how it happened. It’s thanks to Michele Bachmann.”
But Jamieson is keenly aware that it isn’t enough to simply rebut inaccurate claims in real time. One of the key challenges facing science communication is that voters frequently get their news from highly ideological media outlets that sometimes misrepresent the scientific consensus on controversial issues. This has contributed to substantial gaps between what the general public thinks and what scientists think on a wide range of issues, from evolution to the safety of genetically modified foods. To combat this problem, Jamieson recently proposed a new communication strategy called LIVA, an acronym that stands for leveraging scientific credibility (L), involving the audience (I), visualizing the data in a dynamic way (V), and creating relatable analogies for the reader (A). This method has shown promise in shifting people away from their partisan lens and helping them to better understand science. It even seems to work with one of the most polarizing scientific issues of all: climate change.
In Jamieson’s recent study, self-identified conservatives were shown a misleading article from Fox News with the headline “Arctic sea ice up 60 percent in 2013.” Part of this group was then shown additional information using the LIVA method, contextualizing the decades-long downward trend in sea ice and leveraging the credibility of NASA’s measurements. In the end, study participants who were subjected to the LIVA method were more likely to agree with the scientific consensus of a long-term decline in sea ice.
Gary L. Gehman/Annenberg Public Policy Center/PNAS
Jamieson is optimistic that these new science communication methods and sites like Scicheck will improve the overall political discourse. She has hired veteran science journalist Dave Levitan to lead this effort at Scicheck. And while it’s too early to tell if it will be successful, Levitan hopes that his work will make politicians “think more carefully when they talk about science.”
To listen to my entire interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, click below:
Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.
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How Michele Bachmann Inspired Factcheck.org to Debunk Lies About Science
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