Tag Archives: mother jones

This Obama Official Is Going to Bat for Hillary in Nevada

by JuanHarkins94 Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Labor unions are going to help push Hillary Clinton to the nomination—at least that’s the prediction of the nation’s top labor regulator. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez made the claim in Las Vegas Thursday afternoon, while stopping by Nevada’s AFSCME headquarters to stump for Clinton.

Perez was quick to caution that he was appearing in his personal capacity, not as a cabinet official. But he made no apologies for urging labor’s troops to come out and caucus on Saturday for the former Secretary of State, and not Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

“The union members I know, they’re all about results,” he told Mother Jones, explaining why he was sure Clinton would win union voters this weekend. “Not only what you say, but what you’ve done.”

While Perez acknowledged that Clinton’s national union endorsements won’t guarantee support from the rank-and-file (“I’ve spent a lot of time with union members and they’re not reflexive do-what-my-boss-tells-me”), he dismissed the idea that there’s a substantial divide between union leaders and grassroots members who might prefer Sanders, pointing to exit polls from Iowa that showed Clinton winning union households 52-41 percent.

While Perez noted that he had “profound respect for Sen. Sanders” during his speech, while talking with Mother Jones he sounded annoyed by the tone of Sanders’ attacks on Clinton. “I must confess, as a proud progressive who has the scars to show for it—someone who was the subject of roughly 20 Wall Street Journal op-eds against him for my nomination—the notion that you’re either for Bernie or you’re for the establishment, I find that inaccurate, to be charitable,” he said. “Frankly a disservice to people like Dolores Huerta, people like Luis Gutierrez, people like Sherrod Brown. And frankly, President Obama.”

View original post here: 

This Obama Official Is Going to Bat for Hillary in Nevada

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Obama Official Is Going to Bat for Hillary in Nevada

The 20 Feet Separating Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Des Moines

by Chadwick15O Posted on February 2, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The first thing you see when you approach Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, is a young man clad in a bright blue Bernie Sanders T-shirt and hoisting up a Bernie sign.

When you realize that Sanders has an office about 20 feet down the hall from Clinton’s organizing HQ, the sight makes a little more sense. Clinton opened her second-floor office back in June; Sanders opened his office—his state headquarters—in the fall. (As Sanders’ campaign boomed, it had to open a second, larger office 2.5 miles down the road.) “Bless you,” a Bernie canvasser said as she heard someone sneeze from inside the Clinton suite (the door was open).

The man in the entrance is Dakota Nelson, 26, of Delray Beach, Florida. Just two hours before the caucuses kick off, Nelson was taking a break from his grueling 12-hours-a-day canvassing schedule. He looked exhausted and a little jittery, and when asked how it would feel if Clinton were to win the caucuses Monday night, he said he didn’t even want to go there emotionally.

Dakota Nelson greets people at the entrance to an office building that houses both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaign offices. Patrick Caldwell/Mother Jones

Nelson is indicative of what we saw in two Sanders offices in Des Moines on Monday: out of state volunteers working tirelessly to get out the vote for their candidate. Mother Jones came across volunteers from Florida, Ohio, and Alabama. These volunteers explained to us that teams from other states were out canvassing. Sarah Sladick, 20, and Abby Loveless, 19, had come from Birmingham, Alabama, on Thursday to go door-knocking in Newton, Iowa. They ran into Clinton canvassers on the same block and rushed to beat them to people’s doors. When asked about the differences between Alabama and Iowa, Sladick said, “The squirrels are really big.” She and Loveless talked excitedly about how Foster the People and Connor Paolo of Gossip Girl fame had stopped by the office earlier in the day.

Clinton’s office, meanwhile, was filled with Iowans and staffers who had been working hard for a long time. Some had been with the campaign since the spring. “I feel like an honorary Iowan,” said one paid field organizer who’d moved to Iowa from New York in April. Her car even has Iowa license plates.

The Sanders and Clinton offices are a reflection of what is about to play out here: The question is whether a swell of frenzied, passionate volunteers or a months-long ground game of nose-to-the-ground organizers will win the day.

Phone bankers at Clinton’s Des Moines office Patrick Caldwell/Mother Jones

A Sanders poster at Sanders’ Des Moines HQ Patrick Caldwell/Mother Jones

Old school at Clinton’s Des Moines field office Patrick Caldwell/Mother Jones

Enticing Sanders’ volunteers with food Patrick Caldwell/Mother Jones

Volunteers leave their mark at Clinton’s office. Patrick Caldwell/Mother Jones

Originally from:  

The 20 Feet Separating Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Des Moines

Posted in alo, Anchor, Anker, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The 20 Feet Separating Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in Des Moines

Why Detroit’s Teachers Are Suing Their School District

by AlbertaCxb Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After six years of growing class sizes, pay cuts, the declining quality of student work, and more and more mold, roaches, and rodents in their classrooms, Detroit teachers have had enough. On Thursday, the Detroit Federation of Teachers and several parents filed a lawsuit against the city’s school district, claiming the poor school conditions threaten students’ health and asking a judge to fire Darnell Earley, a state-appointed “emergency manager” who previously worked as an emergency manager for the city of Flint.

A few weeks earlier, teachers staged some of the biggest “sick out” strikes in recent memory. Because it’s against the law for teachers to organize a strike in Michigan, the Detroit educators used their sick days to make their point. During the most recent strike on January 21, 88 of the city’s 104 schools were shut down.

For more than a decade, the system has been struggling with large deficits caused in part by post-industrial middle-class flight from cities and the subsequent decline in school revenues. In 2009, there were about 95,000 students in Detroit’s public schools; last year that number was 48,900. Even though the funding per student has gone up—from $12,935 nine years ago to $17,995 last year, according to Mother Jones calculations—the overall money for the school district is in decline because funding follows the students.

Despite years of cuts and increased class sizes, the “total net deficit” (a budget line that measures shortfalls against assets) has grown from $369 million in 2008 to $763 million in 2014.

Earley is the fourth emergency manager to oversee the Detroit Public School system in almost six years. After Gov. Rick Snyder took office in 2011, he greatly expanded the power of emergency managers. They can now end contracts (including collective bargaining agreements), sell off public assets, abolish or create new ordinances, and decide what authority elected officials—from mayors to city council schools board members—can have over schools. And an emergency manager can make these moves without having to worry about being voted out of office. As Paul Abowd reported for Mother Jones, Michigan’s emergency-manager law is considered by many to be more far-reaching than any other like it in the nation.

A few weeks before the strike, Earley sent a memorandum to all teachers instructing them to report all instances of employees advocating for “work stoppage.”

“Teachers call it the ‘snitch memo,'” Margaret Weertz, the editor of the Detroit Teacher, a magazine published by the Detroit Federation of Teachers, told Mother Jones. Despite the memo and a restraining-order request by the district against 23 teachers who took part in the strikes, the protests prompted an inspection of school buildings by Mayor Mike Duggan and a written promise from Earley to take care of the many code violations the inspection uncovered. (Earley’s former work in Flint isn’t helping teachers have faith in their boss and his promises, Weertz added.)

Earley also reportedly failed to meet with teachers in any public forums before the sick outs, says William Weir, a veteran social studies teacher with 19 years of experience in the Detroit Public School system under his belt. Weir tells Mother Jones that none of the four emergency managers he’s worked under “made any real efforts to engage with us.” He added, “The biggest changes and cuts in my school took place under Earley.”

Earley’s office didn’t return repeated phone calls from Mother Jones.

Weir was hired by the Schulze Academy for Technology and Arts in 2010 when the school’s scores were at rock bottom. Like much of the Detroit population, 82 percent of the students at Schulze are poor; only 12 percent of the kids’ parents in the neighborhood have at least a bachelor’s degree, according to Bridge Magazine, a nonprofit publication of the Center for Michigan. And yet, even though half of Weir’s students read below grade level and a third of the class has issues that range from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to learning disabilities, a few years ago his students won a statewide award for a research project on the lack of neighborhood grocery stores.

Image by Brian Widdis, courtesy of the Bridge Magazine

Over the last three years, the Schulze Academy has lost its music, arts, and gym classes, and Weir’s classes grew from 25 students to between 30 and 36 students. The teachers’ aides are gone, too. And this year, even though Weir is a social studies teacher, the principal asked him to teach English classes. The gym teacher became the social studies teacher.

Because of the school system situation—pay cuts, deteriorating conditions, class sizes—it’s simply difficult for Detroit to attract enough teachers. According to the union, there are 170 vacancies right now. “The English and math tests are the big tests that matter. It was either me or our gym teacher doing English,” Weir explained.

Citing the growing budget deficit, Weir says, “Why should we keep these emergency managers around if they are not doing their main job and the quality of student work is going down?”

Weir believes that Earley and previous emergency managers have added to the deficit by wasting resources on expensive consultants that haven’t increased students’ achievement. “Once we got these managers, we started getting these consultants,” Weir said. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was hired by Earely’s predecessor, Robert Bobb. The Detroit Metro Times reported that Bennett was paid close to $18,000 a month and brought at least six other consultants with her who were collectively paid about $700,000 for nine months of work.

“It’s not that our teachers don’t like professional development,” Weir explained. “But we have all of these successful, experienced teachers right here. Why not pay them to do coaching? They won’t leave like these consultants and they know our kids.”

In the same time, Detroit public school test scores in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, have remained the worst among large cities since 2009, according to Bridge Magazine.

“These consultants bring expensive books that the principal tells us to take home. And every year there is a new method. And they show you these videos with kids in a middle-class school, with 12 kids in the classroom, and tell us we should teach the same way,” Weir says, “Well, I have 35 kids and about half of them are about three grades behind.”

The consultant-led curriculum, Weir says, “is designed at the grade level and slightly above. Can you imagine being a child who is three grade levels behind? Knowing you’ll be a failure every day you come in?”

“It used to be you’d have a class where five or six kids were behind,” Weir says about the years before the schools started losing students to suburbs and charter schools. “Now you have five or six who are not behind,” he told Bridge Magazine.

About 100 new charter schools have been opened in the Detroit area since mid-’90s taking some of the most motivated and skilled students away from public schools.

Students at the Schulze Academy in Detroit protesting the loss of gym and music programs Photo courtesy of William Weir

Despite all this, Weir—who worked as a police officer before—says teaching is the best job he’s ever had. He wants to be able to meet the kids where they are, he says, providing as much individual tutoring as possible, a difficult task in a classroom with 35 kids and no teacher aides.

Earlier this year, in his first class as an English teacher, he taught the kids a course he helped create, called “Take a Stand.” Students read standard texts about Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez, and after weeks of reading and writing, Weir assigned them a research project he had designed himself.

“What would you like to take a stand on?” he asked 35 wiggly, excited 11- and 12-year-olds. “I really miss our gym and music classes,” one student replied. “Why don’t we have them anymore?” another student chimed in.

In the next few weeks, Weir’s students read studies about the cognitive, physical and emotional benefits of music and gym classes. They also researched articles about their school’s financial woes, budget cuts, and emergency managers—and they held a protest at the district and wrote letters to their federal, state, and local officials. The state superintendent of Michigan schools, Brian Whiston, responded to students by promising to restore the programs as soon as he can. Emergency Manager Darnell Earley still hasn’t replied.

View this article – 

Why Detroit’s Teachers Are Suing Their School District

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, Gandhi, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Detroit’s Teachers Are Suing Their School District

2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

by Myrna Posted on January 20, 2016

Global warming is real. Scientific Visualization Studio/Goddard Space Flight Center 2015 was almost certainly the hottest year since we began keeping records, according to data released today by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In a press release Wednesday, NASA stated that it was 94 percent confident that last year was the warmest since 1880. Here’s a chart from NOAA: NOAA/NASA “Record warmth was spread throughout the world,” said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Ten of 12 months were records. That’s the first time we’ve seen that.” NASA/NOAA Shattered global temperature records are becoming increasingly commonplace, thanks to climate change; with today’s announcement, all five of the hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. But the amount by which 2015 shattered the previous record, in 2014, was itself a record, scientists said. That’s due in part to this year’s El Niño, characterized by exceptionally high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. NASA/NOAA But Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the effects of El Niño only really appeared in the last few months of the year, and that 2015 likely would have been a record year regardless. “2015 was warm right from the beginning; it didn’t start with El Niño,” he said. “The reason this is such a record is because of the long-term trend, and there is no evidence that trend has slowed or paused over the last two decades.” NASA/NOAA Schmidt added that El Niño is likely to persist into 2016, which means we could be in for a record-breaking year yet again. Credit:   2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record ; ; ;

More – 

2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

Better Than Facebook, Twitter, and Jeb!

by DLTClaribe Posted on December 25, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The long holiday weekend will probably be light on news for me to blog about—no Saturday night Democratic debates this week!—so I figured I’d make another pitch and give you an update on our December fundraising campaign.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, Monika and Clara put together an interesting piece on the state of paying for journalism in the digital age and how our model of reader support makes us pretty darn unique. Here’s an excerpt:

December is a really critical fundraising month for nonprofits like us. But, like you, we are kind of tired of the usual gimmicks that get trotted out around this time—HELP! We’ll go dark if you don’t pitch in! It’s actually true (more on that later), but it doesn’t really appeal to your intelligence.

So we had this idea: What if we tried something different? What if we actually showed you how the sausage is made: transparently explaining the challenges of paying for journalism in the digital age and going into detail about how reader support makes Mother Jones possible?

We want you to understand what reader support is—donations of all sizes, subscriptions, even telling your friends about us—and how it fits into our budget. We think being transparent about the challenges publishers face will make it more compelling for you to support Mother Jones. The first step is this December fundraising campaign.

Our target for December is $200,000. If everyone who visits the site this month gives 2.5 cents, we’re done. If everyone who visits today gives 40 cents, we’re done. If 40,000 people—less than 2 percent of our monthly visitors—each give the price of a latte, we’re done. Are you one of them?

Well, the good news is that they say it seems to be working. I mean, 40,000 people haven’t donated the price of a latte yet—but as of Wednesday afternoon, 2,979 people had donated an average gift of $41.77 (10 lattes?) for a total of $124,428 raised this month. They also say it’s going to be a nail-biter, and we’re quite literally banking on a last-minute donations coming in over the next week to get us over the hump.

And this is the part I find really fascinating—understanding how the internet works for fundraising and where all of those donations are coming from. Between my first post and my experiment interjecting some asks into my GOP debate live blog two weeks ago, the good folks who read this page have donated $6,296, or 5 percent of the total. Not too shabby at all.

Emails to our newsletter subscribers are typically the workhorse, and this year they’ve raised 29 percent of the revenue. Not far behind it, the two “donate” links you see at the top of every page have raised 24%, and those “overlay” ads that appear over the top of our articles when you visit the site have raised 21 percent. Monika and Clara’s piece accounts for 16 percent. Those are the big sources of donations. Facebook and Twitter? A bit here and there, but not so much—and not that different than Jeb Bush’s campaign: So full of promise on day one, but stuck in the low single digits.

I’m delighted to know the folks who read this blog donate more than Facebook and he Twitterverse—and the truth is, several of you have probably made donations through one of those other ways listed above. o thanks to everyone who has already donated.

If you haven’t made a tax-deductible, year-end gift yet, please consider doing so now via credit card or PayPal—we don’t want to let Facebook or Twitter catch us, do we?

Originally from: 

Better Than Facebook, Twitter, and Jeb!

Posted in Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Better Than Facebook, Twitter, and Jeb!

The Top MoJo Longreads of 2015

by KerrieMcVicars Posted on December 25, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In 2015, MoJo readers proved yet again that great long-form reporting belongs online. These richly detailed reports are sparking discussions and inspiring readers to share stories in greater numbers than ever before. Many of our most popular articles published over the past year were heavily researched investigations and deeply reported narratives that originally appeared in the magazine. Here, for your holiday enjoyment, is a selection of our best-loved longreads from the past year. (And once you’re done reading through them, click here for last year’s list, here for our 2013 list, and here for our 2012 list).

What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
Negative consequences just make bad behavior worse. But a new approach really works.
By Katherine Reynolds Lewis

The True Cost of Gun Violence in America
The data the NRA doesn’t want you to see.
By Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee, and James West

The War on Women Is Over—and Women Lost
While you weren’t watching, conservatives fundamentally rewrote abortion laws.
By Molly Redden

The Shockingly Simple, Surprisingly Cost-Effective Way to End Homelessness
Why aren’t more cities using it?
By Scott Carrier

The Scary New Science That Shows Milk Is Bad For You
Why does the government still push three servings a day?
By Josh Harkinson

How the Government Put Tens of Thousands of People at Risk of a Deadly Disease
If it killed politicians instead of prisoners, this illness would be public enemy No. 1.
By David Ferry

Here’s How Bernie Sanders May Be Changing Politics for Good
Inside the wild-haired socialist’s unlikely rise.
By Tim Murphy

The Terrifying Truth About Air Pollution and Dementia
Scientists now suspect that a major cause of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s could be in the air.
By Aaron Reuben

America’s Most Notorious Coal Baron Is On Trial. Here’s the Epic Tale of His Rise and Fall.
The biggest mine disaster in 40 years occurred on Don Blankenship’s watch at Massey Energy.
By Tim Murphy

Read original article:

The Top MoJo Longreads of 2015

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Top MoJo Longreads of 2015

Here’s a Video Showing the Very Worst Anti-Science Bullshit of 2015

by Myrna Posted on December 23, 2015

Snowballs, witch-hunts, and a big measles outbreak. In 2015, science was a favorite punching bag for many of America’s politicians. While leaders of nearly 200 nations met in Paris to hammer out a historic deal to combat climate change, the US Senate held a hearing—hosted by presidential hopeful Ted Cruz (R-Texas)—to debunk the science. It had a subtle title: “Data or Dogma?” In fact, 2015 did nothing to alter the notion that one whole American political party—and nearly all of its candidates for the White House—remains stuck on a murky spectrum from outright climate denial to the policy version of ¯_(ツ)_/¯, as we wrote about all-too often this year. There was, of course, the infamous snowball thrown on the floor of the Senate. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) claimed that global warming wasn’t happening because it was cold when he made the snowball. (Repeat after me: Weather does not a climate trend make.) But perhaps the more insidious attack on science was directed by Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Smith accused government scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of rigging climate data to disprove the so-called “global warming pause” (a contested but popular talking point often used to attack the science). He then attempted to depose the scientists and subpoena their documents. “Political operatives and other NOAA employees likely played a large role in approving NOAA’s decision to adjust data that allegedly refutes the hiatus in warming,” he told the Washington Post. But if you can’t fight the science outright in public, why not simply try to ban the words? That was the ingenious tactic allegedly employed by the state of Florida, under Gov. Rick Scott (R). Employees from several state departments said they had been told not to use the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” in official state business. (The governor denied the allegations.) 2015 also saw yet another round of measles outbreaks, including one that spread at Disneyland in California. Public health officials blamed parents who don’t vaccinate their kids. That anti-vaxxer sentiment found a powerful megaphone in Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who at September’s televised GOP debate repeated the totally discredited—and dangerous—theory that vaccines cause autism. “Autism has become an epidemic,” Trump claimed. “Twenty-five years ago, 35 years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close. It has gotten totally out of control.” (Trump insisted he’s still in favor of vaccines, despite warning a national TV audience that they are endangering children.) Watch the whole, not-so-splendid, anti-science show above. Front-page image credit: Smoke: Claire McAdams/Shutterstock; Man: Everett Collection/Shutterstock Follow this link:  Here’s a Video Showing the Very Worst Anti-Science Bullshit of 2015 ; ; ;

View article: 

Here’s a Video Showing the Very Worst Anti-Science Bullshit of 2015

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s a Video Showing the Very Worst Anti-Science Bullshit of 2015

SantaCon Is the Devil. We Apparently Created It. We Are So Sorry.

by JaimieEnderby Posted on December 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Every day I wake up and check my iPhone and read hundreds of comments from Twitter eggs calling me a stupid libtard intern who hates America and only got his job (or is it an internship?) at pinko commie rag Mother Jones because of nepotism. As though my dad called up SAG and was like “I am an actor from the 70s. Get my son a job at a magazine …founded in the 70s?” It grows tiring, but I get it: It’s an act! It’s a show stupid people—or who my beloved Welsh call “simple”—engage in to demonstrate to their team or to God or to whoever that they are the type of person who doesn’t like our type of publication.

Team sports is what politics is all about. No one wants to admit it, but it’s a well studied field. No one cares about every issue. It would be a huge waste of time to do that. They care strongly about one or two issues, identify with the team that shares their position and then take on the rest of the team’s platform as a form of solidarity, albeit unconsciously,

(A great example of this is southern Democrats who loved infrastructure spending but hated black people and then became Republicans because Democrats were too nice to black people and suddenly they also hated infrastructure spending.)

Anyway, Mother Jones isn’t perfect. Far from it. A lot of our articles I disagree with. But Mother Jones doesn’t really have institutional opinions. The articles are the vetted and edited opinions of the bylined author. (For instance: Not everyone here loves Love Actually)

However, one of the things we here at Mother Jones totally deserve group collective criticism for is being inadvertently responsible for New York City’s worst event of the year: SantaCon.

Atlas Obscura explains:

The original inspiration for SantaCon actually came from a 1977 article in Mother Jones about a four-day event organized by Solvognen, a socio-politically charged anarchist theater group in Denmark. Solvognen, literally “Chariot of the Sun,” took their name from Norse mythology and the name of a highly prized national artifact that represents a horse pulling the sun across the sky.

I hate SantaCon. I hate their vomit. I hate their attitudes. I hate their irascibility. I hate their piss-soaked costumes. I hate their souls. I hate them on a profound level. If I were the type of person who believed in letting people drown, these are the type of people I would let drown. I wish they would just go back to whatever hell they came from (Long Island? Staten Island? Murray Hill?). Their very existence in New York makes me wish we had never fleeced this land from the Native Americans.

SantaCon is just an excuse for people with severe emotional problems to get together and act extra out of control because they’re in a mob. It’s like if The Ox-Bow Incident were set at Christmas and filled with vomit. Or if the Stanford Prison Experiment were set at Christmas and, well, filled with vomit.

I know what you’re going to say: “Oh, the fun police are here! Policing our fun!” I am not a member of the fun police. I am a member of the social contract, which dictates there are ways to act in public police. If you want to drink half a bottle of Jäger and piss yourself while shouting about some imaginary injustice you suffered playing Madden ’98 on Nintendo Dreamcast, go right ahead. But do it in your own home. Don’t do it in public. Being in public means being in public, and when you are in public dressed like Santa—drunk, covered in piss, shouting about some nonsense—you are ruining the experience of other people who happen to be in public. You are a selfish jerk.

What about Halloween or Saint Patrick’s Day, you say? Well, those days are awful too. They’re all just excuses for stupid people who lack the conviction to do what they want to do—be drunk and piss themselves—on a normal day. They need society to arbitrarily say it’s okay to be a stupid drunk with your stupid drunk friends this one day a year. If you were at least an honest asshole you’d let your sociopathic flag fly and be a stupid drunk with your stupid friends just because it’s a Tuesday! Or a Monday! Or Easter! On any given day you can win or you can lose, but if you do it because of an email blast saying other people are going to make it nominally socially acceptable, then you’re a coward. SantaCon is not legally binding. It’s not like The Purge but for bros to act out. You do you, bros. But just know that the fact that you’re doing your thing on the day when normal society has tried to cordon you off means you’re a sheep.

Society hates you.

I hate you, SantaCon. I hate you the way Eddie Murphy hated Alan Arkin when Arkin surprisingly won an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine and Murphy lost for Dreamgirls. I hate you the way I hate people with poor posture, which many of you stupid Santas have, by the way. The religious say, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” I hate you the way the religious hate the sin.

Why are you the way you are? We could lay you on the couch and play psychology—Daddy wasn’t around! Mommy loved your sister more! You come from a long line of alcoholics with no shame and are just playing the part!—but we don’t have to. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to watch in horror as you stumble around drunk, secreting fluids on yourself.

I hope you all make it home alive this Saturday and don’t stumble into the street and drown in your own vomit, but Darwin suggests many of you should probably in fact stumble into the street and drown in your own vomit. I’ve been to the Galapagos. It has a lot of things. It does not have SantaCon.

There’s a line in Richard II where he’s about to be tossed from the throne by Bolingbroke and he says, “Let’s make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the world.” Saturday, thousands of drunken bros will make snow their paper and with bleeding kidneys write sorrow on the bosom of our streets.

So anyway, have a great Saturday! (Have a great life!) Stay safe. And for our part in the creation of SantaCon, we’re eternally sorry.

This article is from: 

SantaCon Is the Devil. We Apparently Created It. We Are So Sorry.

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on SantaCon Is the Devil. We Apparently Created It. We Are So Sorry.

There’s One Piece of Democracy That Fat Cats Can’t Buy

by DanLoftin065 Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A couple of months ago, we told you about how Mother Jones was sued by a billionaire political donor, and how we won a major First Amendment victory. You can read about that case here, but there was one thing we didn’t really go into at the time, and it’s kind of important: Going after media is not just a random thing for a billionaire determined to influence our political debate. It’s the next logical step.

Over the past six years, America has seen a dramatic expansion of the power of the 0.01 percent. First it was economic power: Because of everything from tax policy to the financialization of the economy, wealth has become radically concentrated. That wealth bought political power: Citizens United, the explosion of dark money, the billionaire primary. Now the same concentration of power and wealth is playing out in another arena that is critical to democracy: media.

Our industry is in the middle of an epochal shift in how content is produced, distributed, and, most importantly, paid for. And that matters, because as we learned when the Bush administration was marching America to war, without a critical mass of journalists who can challenge spin and deception, the political process fails.

So that’s what this story is about: How can we make independent, investigative journalism happen at a time of increasingly concentrated power and wealth?

Spoiler: Part of this involves a pitch. December is a really critical fundraising month for nonprofits like us. But, like you, we are kind of tired of the usual gimmicks that get trotted out around this time—HELP! We’ll go dark if you don’t pitch in! It’s actually true (more on that later), but it doesn’t really appeal to your intelligence.

So we had this idea: What if we tried something different? What if we actually showed you how the sausage is made: transparently explaining the challenges of paying for journalism in the digital age and going into detail about how reader support makes Mother Jones possible?

Maybe you already know—in which case, here’s your button:

But Maybe you’re the kind of person who wants the bigger picture. so here goes. You probably know that “legacy media” has taken a hit, but here is a number that brings it into stark relief: In 2007, there were 55,000 journalists working in America’s daily newsrooms. In 2014, it was down to just under 33,000—and all the hot digital shops you hear about employed maybe an extra 4,000.

This is not about paper versus pixels, broadcast versus streaming, or whatever other analog-versus-digital metaphor you prefer. It’s simply that the very structures that used to ensure a robust Fourth Estate have pretty much fallen apart. There are two models we’ve historically used to finance journalism in America, and neither of them is built to ensure a critical mass of watchdog journalism going forward.

The first model is what you might call eyeball bundling: When you give a media company a few seconds or minutes of your attention, the company can sell a portion of that attention to advertisers. Some of the money is spent to create content, which draws more eyeballs, and so on. It’s an imperfect system, but along a road potholed with kitten slideshows and holiday listicles, some amount of journalism gets made.

The problem is that when advertising is a volume game and the volume of content is infinite, the incentive is to produce cheaper and cheaper content, and to assault users with more and more intrusive ads. So naturally people ignore the ads or install ad blockers, and publishers move on to letting advertisers pay directly for articles—that’s the “native content” you see on sites from Buzzfeed to the New York Times.

Basically, what you get is an arms race of ever more annoyed users versus ever more desperate publishers—and eventually, the whole foundation of the model starts falling apart. Because increasingly, the people who own the eyeballs are not the publishers, but the companies—Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Verizon—on whose apps and devices you access media content. (For more on how “tech is eating media,” see this smart essay by John Herman.) If those companies want to sell those eyeballs and keep the money for themselves, they can do that.

And, of course, they do.

The other model for financing journalism is, basically, sugar daddies. Just as superwealthy individuals can now single-handedly underwrite political campaigns, so too can they create news organizations from whole cloth. Sometimes they do it for thoughtful civic reasons, as when eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched First Look Media. Other times they are hoping for a payoff down the road, like the venture capital investors who are pouring millions into Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, and Vox. Occasionally it’s not quite clear—why, really, did Amazon’s Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? Whatever the motive, the dangers are obvious: What happens when the wealthy funder demands editorial control, or loses interest upon realizing that the new venture doesn’t produce the magical 10x returns?

Just to be really clear about this last part: News doesn’t make money. It never has. Actual, original reporting has always been a de facto nonprofit endeavor, paid for with the revenue from other things (say, sitcoms in a broadcast network, or custom printing in a newspaper company). The only way to end up with a small fortune in journalism is to start with a large one.

There is a third way, though, and this is where MoJo has staked its claim. From our beginning almost 40 years ago, we have made a bet that you would support a newsroom that tells the stories no one else will. And you did. Today, two-thirds of our annual budget comes from readers; some 40,000 of you contribute, more than at any other nonprofit news organization outside public radio and TV.

Here’s how that breaks down: It takes about $13 million to run Mother Jones at our current size. About 15 percent of that comes from advertising, while 15 percent comes from foundations (a few big ones like the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, and a number of smaller family-based ones). Nearly 70 percent is from readers like you.

Some of you—about 175,000, to be exact—subscribe to our magazine. Another 12,000 folks buy individual issues on the newsstand. About 10 percent of our subscribers also become donors—they tack on an extra $20, $50, or even (hooray!) a five- or six-figure gift. Then there are donations in response to specific appeals: For example, about 6,000 people have pitched in online to help us fight the billionaire who sued us for covering his political giving and anti-gay activism. What’s critical for the long haul is that our base is broad and deep enough to ensure that we’re not dependent on any single check or revenue stream.

This model of reader-supported journalism means everything for Mother Jones. It means we can send our reporters after difficult, sometimes dangerous stories without fear that a powerful advertiser or funder will yank us back. It means that in the recession, when the bottom fell out of the advertising market and newsrooms imploded, we were able to open and expand our Washington bureau—because you wanted us to put reporters in the nation’s capital. And it means that today, we reach 9 million people a month, and we’re just getting started.

We believe that when all the craziness in the media landscape has played out, this is how public-interest journalism in America will survive and thrive: by you, the audience, directly supporting it. But here’s the problem we have to solve to get there: Historically, audience support has worked at scale only in the analog world. Your local public radio station gets about 10 percent of its listeners to become supporters. Mother Jones gets about the same rate of support from our print readers—even though we don’t hold your content hostage during pledge drives.

But we all live on the internet now, and while the digital revolution has taken MoJo from an audience of about 200,000 to one of 9 million and growing, reader support hasn’t kept up. Not even close. If the 10 percent ratio held, some 900,000 of our digital readers would donate every month, not a few thousand.

There are some obvious ways to increase that percentage—say, by hiding the stories behind a paywall. But that doesn’t make much sense, since those of you who support us want our journalism to have the biggest possible audience and impact. As do we.

So we need to find another way—for MoJo, and maybe for journalism as a whole.

Starting today, that’s the journey we want to take you on. We want you to understand what reader support is—donations of all sizes, subscriptions, even telling your friends about us—and how it fits into our budget. We think being transparent about the challenges publishers face will make it more compelling for you to support Mother Jones. The first step is this December fundraising campaign.

Most of the time, we’re pretty low-key about our online donor appeals, relying mostly on the “donate” link at the top of every page. But three times a year, we do big campaigns to meet our budget. (And by “meet our budget,” we mean “pay journalists.” Unlike some sites, we believe in paying for the work we publish, and that’s what the lion’s share of our budget goes to.)

Our target for December is $200,000. If everyone who visits the site this month gives 2.5 cents, we’re done. If everyone who visits today gives 40 cents, we’re done. If 40,000 people—fewer than 2 percent of our monthly visitors—each give the price of a latte, we’re done. Are you one of them?

No matter what happens, we’ll be transparent about that, too. So check back here as the month passes, and we’ll update you as we go. We’ll be testing a bunch of different appeals, and when we can, we’ll ask you to weigh in on which might work best.

We don’t know if this transparency thing will work, and that’s kind of terrifying. But it feels right. After all, that’s what we do with our reporting: lay out the facts and let you take it from there. And the facts are that democracy needs a critical press, and the era of that being financed by the magical elves of advertising is coming to a close. Will you be part of the next era?

Illustration by Dale Stephanos.

Follow this link: 

There’s One Piece of Democracy That Fat Cats Can’t Buy

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s One Piece of Democracy That Fat Cats Can’t Buy

5 Big Developments From the Beginning of the Paris Climate Summit

by Simone87Lg Posted on December 3, 2015

green4us

After just a few days, billions of dollars have been committed to clean energy. Yann Caradec/Flickr On Tuesday, more than 100 heads of state departed from Paris, after kicking off two weeks of international negotiations intended to limit climate change. But even though the biggest names have left the building (actually a converted regional airport), the real action is just getting started. If history is any guide, diplomats will be holed up in a room negotiating minute textual details until—or well past—the last possible minute next Friday. Still, the last few days have seen a barrage of developments that aren’t necessarily tied to the core negotiating text. It started on Sunday with a joint commitment from dozens of nations and private corporations to vastly increase their spending on clean energy research and development. Here are a few more key developments, in no particular order: 1. New milestone for fossil fuel divestment: Some of the most prominent activist groups at the summit are focusing their attention on divestment—that is, getting high-profile individuals and institutions to pull their money out of fossil fuel companies. In September, that campaign reached a high-water mark, when a study commissioned by a coalition of environmental groups found that hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals with assets totaling $2.6 trillion had pledged to divest from fossil fuels. Bear in mind, the actual amount of money being pulled out of fossil fuel companies is substantially smaller than that. But it’s nevertheless a pretty impressive number because of the growing movement it represents. On Wednesday, the same coalition updated that figure: It now tops $3.4 trillion. Again, it’s unclear how much of this is actually being divested. (It’s not always easy for a complex institution such as a university to know how much money, if any, it actually has invested in a given industry). But it’s striking that the total jumped nearly $1 trillion in just a couple of months. The African Development Bank promised to pour $12 billion into increasing access to electricity. 2. Big boost to clean energy in Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world’s lowest rates of access to electricity; nearly two-thirds of people there live without power. That makes it hard to grow a business, hard for kids to study, and hard to store fresh food and medical supplies. As we’ve reported before, it also represents a huge opportunity for renewable energy. Small-scale wind and solar projects, while not up to the task of fully supplying the continent’s electricity needs, can often be deployed more rapidly than big fossil-fuel-fired power plants. On Tuesday, the African Development Bank announced that it would pour $12 billion into energy projects over the next five years and seek to attract up to $50 billion in parallel private-sector funding. The project has two goals: to vastly expand basic energy access, and to do so cleanly, by boosting the continent’s renewable energy capacity tenfold. This is just the latest sign that the clean energy industry is likely to be one of the biggest winners from the Paris climate talks. 3. China is playing ball: President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping set the joint climate action ball rolling more than a year ago, when they announced a sweeping plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions and pool resources on clean energy. Since then, China and the United States—the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 carbon polluters, respectively—have stayed close on their climate agendas. That trend appears to be continuing in Paris, a rare point of diplomatic accord in an otherwise testy relationship. China has said it could agree to reevaluating its climate goals every five years, a protocol that the United States, the European Union, and other leading emitters are pushing strongly to include in the final agreement. On Wednesday, Chinese officials back in Beijing also announced deep new targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. India has also rolled out a new $30 million plan to invest in clean energy, although that country remains opposed to the five-year review standard. Russia, meanwhile, doesn’t appear interested in doing much at all. Tensions between the United States, China, India, Russia, Canada, Brazil, and other heavyweights—not to mention small island nations and other highly vulnerable players—are likely to become more apparent as the talks progress into finer minutiae. 4. Who’s going to pay for all this? One of the most contentious issues in Paris is climate finance, a term that refers broadly to cash ponied up by wealthy, high-polluting nations such as the United States to help poorer countries adapt to climate change impacts and reduce their carbon emissions. In 2009, at the last major climate summit, developed countries agreed to raise $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020. That goal is about halfway met, according to the World Resources Institute. On Tuesday, Obama announced an additional $30 million from the United States for climate adaptation in the most vulnerable countries, on top of a $3 billion promise the United States made to the UN Green Climate Fund last year. But it’s unclear how the Paris agreement will ensure that this fundraising continues. Delegates will have to hash out what sorts of commitments can or should be legally binding, how to count the money, how to spend it, and other important considerations. Jake Schmidt, an international programs director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said many developing countries are pushing to include language in the agreement that would require the total level of finance to be gradually ramped up over time. “I don’t think anyone is envisioning there will be a new [specific] number, but rather asking that $100 billion is a floor to the finance that will be mobilized over time,” he said. The same is true of countries’ various greenhouse gas reduction targets, he said: A big question at the talks is how these commitments can be enforced and strengthened past the next decade or two. “We’re leaving Paris with a sense that it could be 10 or 15 years before we return to these targets,” he said. “If we don’t have another moment to reevaluate these, then we have a problem.” 5. Cities are playing a big role: National governments aren’t the only players in Paris. Cities and states are also offering their own commitments. One of the most prominent voices at the summit so far has been that of California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who is pushing a group of 60 states and cities around the world to sign on to a sub-national climate agreement. Meanwhile, on Tuesday a group of 21 mayors committed to dedicating 10 percent of their municipal budgets to climate “resilience,” which includes steps like making infrastructure more weatherproof and restricting energy consumption by buildings. They include the mayors of Paris, New Orleans, Oakland, Rio de Janeiro, and other global cities.

See the original post: 

5 Big Developments From the Beginning of the Paris Climate Summit

Related Posts

Stanford Professors Urge Withdrawal From Fossil Fuel Investments
Leave Fossil Fuels Buried to Prevent Climate Change, Study Urges
A Massive Climate Summit Is About to Happen in Paris. Here’s What You Need to Know.
A Massive Climate Summit Just Started in Paris. Here’s What You Need to Know.
Obama on Climate Change: “No Challenge Poses a Greater Threat to Future Generations”
National Briefing | Religion: Church Dropping Fossil Fuel Investments

Share this:






Continue reading here:

5 Big Developments From the Beginning of the Paris Climate Summit

Posted in alo, ATTRA, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 5 Big Developments From the Beginning of the Paris Climate Summit