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These 15 Albums Might Actually Make 2016 Tolerable

by NanceeLockhart Posted on December 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Each year, Mother Jones‘ favorite music critic browses through hundreds of new albums and pulls out maybe a couple hundred for his weekly reviews. But only a few can make the final-final cut. Below, in alphabetical order, are Jon Young’s super-quick takes on his 15 top albums for 2016. (Feel free to heartily disagree and share your own faves in the comments.)

1. William Bell, This Is Where I Live (Stax): The tender, moving return of an underrated soul great.

2. David Bowie, Blackstar (Columbia/ISO): The Thin White Duke’s eerie, haunting farewell.

3. Gaz Coombes, Matador (Hot Fruit Recordings/Kobalt Label Services): Grand, witty megapop from the former Supergrass leader. (Full review here.)

4. Bob Dylan, The 1966 Live Recordings (Columbia/Legacy): A massive compilation of every note from his notorious tour. (Full review here.)

5. Margaret Glaspy, Emotions and Math (ATO): No-nonsense relationship tales that rock out with insistent verve.

6. Hinds, Leave Me Alone (Mom + Pop/Lucky Number): Frayed, rowdy femme-punk straight outta Madrid.

7. Jennifer O’Connor, Surface Noise (Kiam): Tuneful, deadpan folk-pop with a cutting edge. (Full review here.)

8. Brigid Mae Power, Brigid Mae Power (Tompkins Square): Hair-raising solo acoustic performances by an Irish chanteuse. (Full review here.)

9. Dex Romweber, Carrboro, (Bloodshot): A colorful Americana kaleidoscope from a master balladeer and rockabilly shouter. (Full review here.)

10. Sad13, Slugger (Carpark): Sadie Dupuis’ solo debut, poppier than her band Speedy Ortiz, and exuberantly feminist.

11 & 12. The Scientists, A Place Called Bad (Numero Group); and Blonde Redhead, Masculin Feminin (Numero Group): The great Chicago reissue label scores again with retrospectives devoted to The Scientists, Australian trash-rockers from the ’70s and ’80s, and Blonde Redhead’s ’90s shoegaze-noise recordings amid the chaotic New York scene. (Full review here.)

13. Allen Toussaint, American Tunes (Nonesuch): The gorgeous final works of the New Orleans R&B genius. (And here’s our recent chat with Toussaint collaborator Aaron Neville.)

14. A Tribe Called Quest, We Got It from Here…Thank You 4 Your Service (Epic): The long-overdue return, and devastating goodbye, of a hip-hop institution.

15. Various Artists, The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986 (Light in the Attic): An eye-opening survey of vintage new age music in all its oddball, unexpected glory.

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These 15 Albums Might Actually Make 2016 Tolerable

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Big Mac Followup

by ShavonneHaber Posted on December 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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I got showered with comments yesterday about the Big Mac. It’s so much more than the middle bun, you cretin! Even my sister got on my case about it. My sister!

So today I went out to our newly refurbished McDonald’s and got one. My conclusion: it was fine. The special sauce was fine, the pickles were fine, and it was a perfectly good hamburger on the McDonald’s scale of hamburgers. About halfway through eating it, though, it suddenly occurred to me that…it sure had a lot of bread. But all of you Big Mac lovers like the extra bun, I guess. De gustibus.

I haven’t been to McDonald’s in a long time, and I see that they now hand out numbers like most other places. Unlike other places, however, mine has a staff that comes by and takes your number from the table without leaving any food. It took a while to sort this out, so I used the time to load Facebook on my phone. I did this because apparently blog posts with inline images (like the one on the right) don’t render very well in Facebook Instant, whatever that is. And since half our traffic now comes from mobile Facebook users, this is a problem.

So I got the Facebook app loaded and then scrolled through my feed, but there was nothing of mine there. Hmmm. I’ve never paid much attention to Facebook, so I wasn’t sure what to do. I searched for MoJo, and then liked it, figuring that might make MoJo content appear. Oddly, though, what it mostly did was make lots of Brad DeLong posts appear. What’s going on up there at Cal? I got this sorted out eventually, but it turns out the MoJo digital team has been curating the feed so that the troublesome posts don’t go up. So I still don’t know quite what’s going on. But I’ll find out soon enough when I chat with our web folks.

That was my midday. How was yours?

Originally posted here:  

Big Mac Followup

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

by WilfordLockhart Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s transition team announced one phase of the president-elect’s plan to “drain the swamp” of corruption—a prohibition on registered lobbyists serving in his administration and a five-year lobbying ban for Trump officials who return to the private sector. Trump’s plan effectively doubles down on a policy that the Obama administration already has in place—one that many good government groups and lobbyists alike believe may have created a new problem: un-lobbyists—that is, influence-peddlers who avoid registering as lobbyists to skirt the administration’s rules.

Obama, like Trump, campaigned on a platform of aggressively rooting out the influence of lobbyists. After taking office, he put in place several major good-government initiatives, including a ban on lobbyists serving in his administration and a two-year cooling-off period before ex-administration officials could register to lobby. Once Obama’s lobbying rules took effect, there was a sharp decline in the number of registered lobbyists. Industry insiders and watchdog groups that track the influence game noted that the decrease was not due to lobbyists hanging up their spurs as hired guns for corporations and special interests. Rather it appeared that lobbyists were finding creative ways to avoid officially registering as such. There was no less influence-peddling going on, but now there was less disclosure of the lobbying that was taking place.

The problem lies with the definition of who is a lobbyist. The federal government requires anyone who spends more than 20 percent of their time on behalf of a client while making “lobbying contacts”—an elaborate and specifically defined type of contact with certain types of federal officials—to register as a lobbyist and file quarterly paperwork disclosing their clients and the bills or agencies he or she sought to sway. But by avoiding too many official “lobbying contacts” and limiting how much income that kind of work accounts for, lobbyists can shed the scarlet L, describing themselves as government affairs consultants or experts in advocacy and public policy. In 2014, the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics examined the trend of the “un-lobbyist” and found that 45 percent of the lobbyists who had shed their designation in the previous year still worked for the same employer. In many cases, the lobbyists didn’t leave their jobs, CRP found, they just changed their titles.

The Trump plan, which just tacks three years on to the Obama administration’s existing ban, does stop short of the Obama rules in one area. Under Obama’s policy, people who had been registered lobbyists could not work for agencies they had previously lobbied, though he did offer “waivers” to certain officials. According to Trump aides, registered lobbyists will be eligible for administration jobs if they de-register as lobbyists. The Washington Post reports that Josh Pitcock, a close aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, took the step on Monday, sending the Senate Clerk’s office notice that he is no longer a lobbyist for the State of Indiana.

In the end, said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, the Trump plan may only perpetuate the problem of un-lobbyists.

“People are going to react to the Trump thing in the same way,” Painter notes, “by saying, ‘I’ll figure out a way to not be a lobbyist.'”

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

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Alcohol and Crime: The Story Isn’t Quite So Simple

by JennaManifold Posted on November 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The chart below comes from Wonkblog. It’s from a study of crime in Oregon, and shows that at age 21—the legal drinking age in Oregon—crime spikes considerably:

One striking chart shows how alcohol can turn people into criminals

As soon as people turned 21, their likelihood of criminality spiked considerably….The number of charges filed against 21-year-olds was similar to the number for 19-year-olds. In other words, from a criminal-justice standpoint, turning 21 is akin to turning back the clock to your late teens.

The mechanism by which this works is fairly obvious — access to alcohol increases dramatically at age 21. That brings more intoxication, and with it more aggressive, belligerent and criminally stupid behavior.

Sometimes, though, one striking chart isn’t enough. Sometimes you really need to see a whole bunch of them. I apologize for the size and readability of this, but I think it’s best if I show you everything, instead of just picking and choosing. Here’s the complete set of charts from the Oregon study:

Virtually the entire effect is driven not by “more aggressive, belligerent and criminally stupid behavior” in general—violent crime shows no effect at all—but specifically by alcohol-related offenses: DUI/reckless driving, providing alcohol to minors, public disorder, and so forth. The authors suggest there might be some small effect on assault, trespass, marijuana, and cocaine. But if you take a look at those charts without pre-assuming a change at age 21, you see a very vague scatterplot that doesn’t really suggest anything special at that age.

Bottom line: Legal access to alcohol certainly increases alcohol use, and therefore increases the rate of drunk driving, alcohol-induced public disorder, and providing alcohol to minors. You hardly need a study to tell you that. But on all other kinds of crime? It seems to have barely any effect at all.

Originally posted here:  

Alcohol and Crime: The Story Isn’t Quite So Simple

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The Lead-Crime Era Is Now Firmly Behind Us

by Aracely82H Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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The FBI reported today that the murder rate in the US was up 11 percent in 2015. That’s a pretty big jump, and I don’t want to minimize it. Before we panic too much, however, it’s worth noting that the overall violent crime rate was up only 3 percent. The absolute number of murders is fairly small, which means that it tends to be more volatile than the overall violent crime rate.

If you’re wondering how I’ll make a connection to lead, here it is: this is probably a sign that we’re now firmly in a post-lead crime era. Thanks to the ban on leaded gasoline, the number of teenagers born in a high-lead environment has been falling for 20 years, and that’s produced a steady decline in the violent crime rate. But by now, pretty much everyone under the age of 30 has grown up in the unleaded gasoline era, and we’ve made only modest progress in reducing lead further.

What this means is that lead abatement has run its course. From now on, unless we do something about the remaining lead in soil and paint, crime rates will reflect other factors: drugs, guns, poverty, race, policing, etc. Unleaded gasoline has done what it could, and now the rest is up to us.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s worth noting that this applies mostly to North America and Europe. In much of Asia, South America, and the Middle East, leaded gasoline held on a lot longer. In those places, we likely have another 10-20 years of declining crime rates thanks to a reduction in the number of kids who grow up with lead poisoning.

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The Lead-Crime Era Is Now Firmly Behind Us

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Chart of the Day: For the 7th Straight Year, Illegal Immigration Remains a Non-Crisis

by YettaPreiss Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

Here’s the latest from Pew:

The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population — 11.1 million in 2014 — has stabilized since the end of the Great Recession, as the number from Mexico declined but the total from other regions of the world increased, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on government data. …Mexicans remain the majority of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population, but their estimated number — 5.8 million in 2014 – has declined by about half a million people since 2009.

The immigration hawks claim that this all changed in 2015, and once we get that data we’ll see that the ravaging hordes are back. You betcha. But until we get that data, the actual facts remain about the same as always: the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US has been stable for nearly a decade, and it’s well below its 2007 peak. As crises go, illegal immigration is a pretty poor one.

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Chart of the Day: For the 7th Straight Year, Illegal Immigration Remains a Non-Crisis

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Trump Foundation Involved in Yet More Corruption

by BeatrizKingsmil Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

Donald Trump’s foundation is in the news again:

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole. In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.

Sorry Donald. You’re not allowed to use your charity to pay off your business obligations:

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing as I’ve seen in a while,” Tenenbaum said.

I don’t think I can count the number of reporters who have investigated the Clinton Foundation or the number of pieces they’ve written. The net result has been (a) no actual serious misconduct uncovered, but (b) a steady drumbeat of stories implying that something improper was going on.

Now then: how many reporters have been investigating the Trump Foundation? I might be missing someone, but basically the answer is one: David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post. The net result has been (a) plenty of actual misconduct uncovered, but (b) very little in the way of public attention to it.

This is why so many people can somehow believe that Hillary Clinton is less trustworthy than Donald Trump. In truth, it’s not even close. Trump is probably the world champion in the sport of lying; he cares about nothing but enriching himself and getting even with his enemies; and his political positions change with the wind. He’s just about the least trustworthy person on the planet.

But he’s entertaining. Gotta give him that. And really, isn’t that what matters?

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Trump Foundation Involved in Yet More Corruption

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Early Warning: Another Medical Malpractice "Crisis" May Be on the Horizon

by Jeffery72M Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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I have some bad news for you, though I admit it won’t be immediately obvious from this Wall Street Journal article:

Americans are starting to fight back against a wave of insurance-price increases on decades-old life policies.

Over the past year, several major insurers have notified tens of thousands of people of higher costs to keep their policies in force, with increases ranging from midsingle-digit percentages to more than 200%, according to financial advisers. To justify the increases, they blamed the impact on their investments from the Federal Reserve’s decision to keep interest rates lower for longer.

….“Companies are under a lot of pressure to boost returns in this low-interest-rate environment, and this is one lever they have,” said Scott Robinson, an associate managing director at Moody’s Investors Service….Life insurers have been among the companies hardest hit by the Fed’s policies, which have been mirrored by many central banks around the world. These firms earn much of their profit by investing customers’ premiums in bonds until claims come due.

So what’s the bad news, aside from the fact that a bunch of folks who bought life insurance are getting screwed? Just this: insurance company investments are doing poorly, and that means premiums have to go up. This hits life insurance first, but soon it will hit other types of insurance too—including medical malpractice insurance. This has happened three times in the past four decades, and in all three cases the result has been a tidal wave of claims that medmal suits are ruining the country and nuisance suits needs to be reined in.

The evidence is pretty clear that this isn’t true. The last time I looked, during the medmal crisis of 2003, it was quite clear that neither the number of medmal suits nor the amount of money paid out had changed much. What had happened was the usual: insurance company investments were doing poorly and they raised premiums to make up for it.

So if insurance companies are once again having portfolio problems, it’s a good guess that this will hit the medmal industry sooner or later, and premiums will go up. Doctors will start screaming, and Republicans will demand caps on malpractice payouts—something that does nothing to rein in nuisance lawsuits but does hurt trial lawyers badly. And trial lawyers give lots of money to Democrats.

Maybe we’ll dodge a bullet this time. But if we don’t, and medmal premiums start rising again, keep your ears open for all the usual bogus tort reform arguments. They’ll follow just as surely as the night follows the day.

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Early Warning: Another Medical Malpractice "Crisis" May Be on the Horizon

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About That New Lead Study….

by SherrieQ08 Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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A new study was released recently about the effect of childhood lead poisoning on future academic performance. After reading it, I decided not to post about it, but since it’s getting some attention I should probably explain why. This will take a while, so be patient.

First things first: The basic idea here is uncontroversial. We’ve known for decades that childhood lead exposure reduces IQ, stunts academic development, and leads to lower test scores. But most of the original studies in this area were done a long time ago, when childhood lead levels were much higher than they are now. Blood lead levels are measured in micrograms per deciliter, and kids in the 70s and 80s frequently had levels as high as 20 or 30. Today that’s rare, so this paper focuses on something different: small changes in children who already had fairly low lead levels. For example, what would be the effect of a drop from 4 to 3?

To measure this, they rounded up records for nearly every third-grader in Rhode Island. These records included both blood lead levels in infancy and academic performance later in childhood, which is just what you need. The problem is that you can’t just compare those two things. It’s common knowledge that kids with high lead levels also tend to be poor, have less educated mothers, belong to minority groups, etc. Since all of these things are correlated with poor academic performance, you have to control for them somehow. It’s very difficult to do properly since you can never be entirely sure there isn’t something you haven’t overlooked.

So the authors looked at another variable unique to Rhode Island. Starting in 1997, Rhode Island required landlords to certify their rentals as lead-free. Kids who live in certified housing are likely to have lower lead levels, which means you can compare that to academic performance instead. Unfortunately, you run into the same problem: people who live in certified housing are unlikely to be a random subset. You have to control for different stuff, but you still have to run a lot of controls.

To address this, the authors used an instrumental variables approach. They constructed a remarkably complex variable that models “the probability that a child’s home was certified at the time of birth as a function of the number of certificates that had been issued in their census tract as of their year of birth, as well as family characteristics, and tract, year, and month of birth fixed effects.” After all that, though, they found only small effects:

The estimated effects of lead in these models are strongly statistically significant but relatively small: The column (4) estimates suggest that a one point increase in mean BLLs is estimated to reduce reading scores by .306, and math scores by .193.

So going from a lead level of 4 to 3 raises test scores by less than a third of a point on an 80-point scale. A 3-point reduction—which is fairly large these days—would raise test scores by about a point in reading and half a point in math.

But that’s not the end. There are two ways of measuring lead levels: venous (a standard blood draw) and finger pricks. Venous is more accurate, but finger pricks are more common. The venous measures show a stronger effect from lead exposure, so the authors constructed yet another instrumental variable to take this into account, and that produced a bigger estimate of lead on test scores: about half a point for reading and a third of a point for math.

But we’re not done yet. The authors then generate another instrumental variable, along with all the usual controls, and this produces an even bigger estimate: about one point for reading and 0.4 points for math. In both cases, however, the standard errors are quite large and the correlation coefficients are minuscule. In the case of math, the results are not statistically significant even at the 10 percent level.

This is the point at which I emphasize that I’m no expert in the design of studies like this. Controls are perfectly legit. Instrumental variables are perfectly legit—though you have to be careful not to get over-clever about them. Trying to correct for measurement problems is perfectly legit. And yet, when you put this all together it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There are lots of controls. The main instrumental variable might be appropriate, but I couldn’t quite convince myself of that. It’s also a very complex instrument, which makes it hard to evaluate. The measurement stuff looks suspiciously like a post-hoc way of generating a bigger effect. It all feels very fragile. And even after all this, the statistical value of the results is weak.

I may be wrong about every aspect of this. It will take a real expert to go through the paper and make an informed judgment. In the meantime, though, I’d take it with a grain of salt. There’s no question that childhood lead exposure reduces academic performance, but for now I’d say I’m skeptical that the effect is as large at low levels as the authors suggest.

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About That New Lead Study….

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Creating Panic Is Bad for the Country, But Good for Politicians

by PaulettPearl Posted on August 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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There was another stampede at an airport Sunday night, when passengers at LAX wrongly thought they heard guns being fired:

A loud noise mistaken for gunfire led to rumors that spread at blazing speed in person and on social media, setting off a panic that shut down one of the nation’s busiest airports, as passengers fled terminals and burst through security cordons, and as the police struggled to figure out what was happening and to restore order.

Far from being an isolated episode, it was essentially what had happened on Aug. 13 at a mall in Raleigh, N.C.; on Aug. 14 at Kennedy International Airport in New York; on Aug. 20 at a mall in Michigan; and on Aug. 25 at a mall in Orlando, Fla.

Spreading panic over terrorism has real effects. This is one of them. We are being turned into a nation of babies.

The number of terrorist attacks in the US is minuscule. The number of people in the US who die from terrorist attacks is minuscule. But I suppose the political advantage from scaring the hell out of people about terrorism is fairly substantial. And that’s all that counts, isn’t it?

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Creating Panic Is Bad for the Country, But Good for Politicians

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