Tag Archives: people

The Election in Arizona Was a Mess

by Trinidad36A Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Faith Decker, a 19-year-old sophomore at Arizona State University, got off work a little early Tuesday night so she could vote in her first-ever primary. She arrived at a church in southeast Phoenix just before 7 p.m. to find “the line wrapped completely around the corner, 300 to 400 people.” After waiting in that line for more than three hours, she finally reached the check-in desk. She was told that she couldn’t vote—not because the polls had closed three hours before, but because she was registered in a different county.

Decker says that while waiting in line, she saw several people get frustrated and leave before they cast their ballots, and that the election workers seemed confused, taking a long time to process voters once they got to the table.

“It’s just kind of all a giant disappointment to everyone who usually comes out and votes in person,” she said. And as a first-time voter she was shocked “to see that it was so unorganized, or disorderly.”

Decker’s long wait and disappointing outcome was shared by many voters in Maricopa County, Arizona, the state’s biggest county, with 2 million registered voters, who live in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale, and other larger communities. Images of people waiting hours under the hot sun and into the night filled Twitter timelines and cable TV broadcasts. The last person to cast a ballot didn’t do so until after midnight, according to the Arizona Republic, nearly five hours after the Democratic race had already been called for Hillary Clinton, and a few hours after Donald Trump was declared as the Republican winner.

Election officials said that the long lines were due, in part, to a large number of unaffiliated or independent voters trying to vote. Only those registered with one of the recognized parties were allowed to cast ballots. The state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, issued a statement Wednesday morning calling the situation “unacceptable” and called for allowing independents to be able to vote in presidential primaries.

But Arizona has a long history of problems at the ballot box. Until 2013, the Grand Canyon State was one of 16 states required to clear all changes to voting law and procedures with the US Department of Justice, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because of its history of discriminatory and racist election practices. The two-part formula used to determine which jurisdictions would fall under the Department of Justice’s review process was created nearly fifty years before in 1965 and attempted to insure that the voting age population actually was able to vote. The first criteria was if a jurisdiction had a “test or device” that restricted the opportunity to register to vote on Nov. 1, 1964. The state would also be scrutinized if less than half of voting-age people in a jurisdiction were registered to vote, or if less than half of the voting-age population actually did vote in the presidential election of November 1964.

The formula was ruled unconstitutional in the 2013 US Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, in which an Alabama County argued that jurisdictions covered by Section 5 “must either go hat in hand to Justice Department officialdom to seek approval, or embark on expensive litigation in a remote judicial venue.” With the court’s ruling, Arizona (and the other states and jurisdictions previously covered by so-called “pre-clearance”) could make changes to voting laws and procedures without federal oversight. But in a state that took six years to adopt a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, is the home of the controversial Maricopa County Sheriff, and Donald Trump supporter, Joe Arpaio, and where SB 1070 required police to determine a person’s immigration status when there was “reasonable suspicion” that they were in the country illegally, the difficulties in voting raised some concerns about darker motivations.

Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, the woman in charge of administering the county’s elections, said in an interview with a local news reporter Tuesday night that “the voters, for getting in line” were at least partly to blame for the long lines:

On Wednesday she told the county board of supervisors that she would “do it differently” if she could do it again, and that she “takes the blame” for what went wrong. She also blamed independent and unaffiliated voters who tried to vote for slowing down the process. Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo said, “I just don’t buy that,” according to the Arizona Republic.

Purcell couldn’t be reached for comment.

One reason for the long lines is the fact that the county went from 200 polling locations in 2012 to just 60 in 2016. As Republic reporter Caitlin McGlade noted Tuesday night, Maricopa County’s 60 polling locations worked out to about one for every 20,833 eligible voters, compared to one polling station serving 2,500 voters in other Arizona counties.

State Sen. Martín Quezada, (D-Phoenix), offered his own explanation for the lack of polling locations in his area on Wednesday:

Tammy Patrick, the county’s former federal elections compliance officer, is now a senior advisor of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington DC, where she consults with jurisdictions around the country about voting administration best practices. She said that the comparison between 200 polling stations in 2012 and 60 in 2016 is misleading because the 200 polling stations in 2012 were “precinct-specific”, while the 60 this year were so-called “voting centers,” where voters could cast ballots anywhere in the county. Jurisdictions in 33 states are moving to or already use a vote-center model, she says, which are attempts by local election officials to help voters who appear at incorrect precinct voting locations.

“This alleviates all of that,” she says. “People could go anywhere, but it also meant they had to have much larger facilities. So they had fewer number of options on where they could get a facility large enough to be a vote center that would allow them in.”

Patrick’s job from late 2004 through the end of the Voting Rights Act coverage in 2013 was to make sure Maricopa County voting decisions complied with federal laws. She said her former county election colleagues “were all very disappointed when the Voting Rights Act enforcement went away because it kind of protected them from the crazy legislature down the street.”

The question remains why county level officials limited the number of vote-centers to just 60, but Patrick suggests it might have to do with finding locations around the county that could accommodate large groups of people and would likely have occurred under the old Voting Rights Act requirements, despite suggestions to the contrary. She admitted, though, that there’s a context for concerns about discrimination.

“It’s a heightened environment, without a doubt,” she says. “Anything that doesn’t go absolutely perfectly is going to be viewed as some sort of a tactic. Now when it comes to things like legislation, that’s quite possible that there are legislative acts that are done down the street that maybe have that sort of intent, but that’s certainly not the case at the local level.”

The Arizona Republic called the entire situation an “outrage” in an editorial Wednesday, and added that the decision to switch to a vote-center model was a “cost-cutting measure” that was “badly bungled” by county election officials who “did not account for such things as high turnout or parking.”

Whoever’s to blame, the net result was the same: thousands of people stood in line for hours, some of whom gave up and ended up not voting. Erika Andiola, the national press secretary for Latino outreach for the Sanders campaign, said she heard from her volunteers about people leaving lines and waiting hours and hours to vote.

“I’m pretty sure that other campaigns were concerned,” Andiola says. “It’s not just about Bernie Sanders, but it’s really about Arizona. How can you have such a big number of people who are trying to participate in our elections that are treated this way? We want to encourage voting, we don’t want to discourage voting. That’s definitely not something we should be doing in any state.”

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The Election in Arizona Was a Mess

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It’s Old People Who Have More Debt, Not the Young

by LouisGoldstein Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ylan Mui points today to a February note from the New York Fed called “The Graying of American Debt.” Here’s the basic picture:

The student debt story is about what you’d expect: young consumers have more of it, but their total debt load is lower than it was in 2003 because they have lower mortgage debt. Basically, they’re trading student debt for mortgage debt.

But older age groups make up for it with higher debt than they had in 2003. This is especially true at age 65, where total debt is up by about a third over the past decade. So what does it all mean?

The close relationship between credit score and age…reflects an average credit history that is considerably stronger among older borrowers….Further, older borrowers’ income streams are comparatively stable, and they have greater experience with credit. Survey of Consumer Finances data show that net worth levels for households with heads who are age 65 and older in 2013 are quite similar to their 2004-07 levels. This holds despite the evidence, seen in the second chart in this post, that consumers are holding substantially more per capita debt at age 65 and beyond. If history is any guide, then, we expect older borrowers to make more reliable payments. Indeed, our data show no clear trend toward higher delinquency at older ages as average balances at older ages have increased.

Hence the aging of the American borrower bodes well for the stability of outstanding consumer loans. At the same time, the likely combination of muted credit access and lower demand for credit that we observe among our younger borrowers may well have consequences for growth. The graying of American debt that we observe between 2003 and 2015, then, might be interpreted as a shift toward greater balance sheet stability, and away from credit-fueled consumption growth.

More stability, less growth. Just what old people want. But is it good for the country?

Taken from – 

It’s Old People Who Have More Debt, Not the Young

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

by RamiroRestrepo9 Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s pretty common knowledge that Donald Trump lies routinely about his wealth and his businesses. He can get away with this because he runs a private company and isn’t required to open his books to the public.

But there was one period in his life when he ran a public company. Here’s the backstory: During the ’80s, Trump invested heavily in Atlantic City casinos. He ended up owning three of them, culminating in the Trump Taj Mahal, a billion-dollar monstrosity that was ill conceived and poorly run, hemorrhaging money from the day it opened. Trump had borrowed heavily during this period, guaranteeing many of the loans personally, and this was the last straw. His company was bankrupt.

He would have been personally bankrupt, too, but his creditors decided to put him on a leash and let him try to work his way out. He made steady progress, but the casinos continued to be a millstone around his neck. By the mid-’90s, however, the stock market was getting hot and lots of small investors, then as now, were mesmerized by the Trump name. So Trump decided that as long as there were lots of rubes who still thought he was a great businessman, he might as well take advantage of them. Timothy O’Brien tells the story in TrumpNation:

In a masterstroke of financial maneuvering, and in a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Trump managed to take two of the Trump casinos—the Plaza and the Taj Mahal—public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when Donald was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and unload huge amounts of debt. The offering yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely.

…In one fell swoop someone else became responsible for the debts that almost sank Donald…Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn’t entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren’t his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations.

…Allan Sloan, the financial writer who had opined with great accuracy on many things Trump, offered a fair warning to Trump Hotels’ investors: “Shareholders and bondholders have to be total fools ever to think that Donald Trump will put their interests ahead of his own.”…Donald spent several years proving Sloan correct.

…Just a few months after Trump Hotels absorbed the Taj, Donald sold his last Atlantic City casino, the Castle, to the public company. That is, Donald sold his own casino, with all of its heavy debts, to a public company he controlled. The $490 million price tag for the Castle was about $100 million more than analysts thought it was worth…sending the company’s stock into a nosedive from which it never recovered.

…Although Trump Hotels’ shares were sinking and there were no earnings to be seen, Donald paid himself $7 million for his handiwork at the company in 1996…Jerry Useem at Fortune took note in 2000 of Donald’s “disquieting” tendency to “use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank.” In addition to the multimillion-dollar bonuses Donald was lifting out of Trump Hotels, Useem pointed out that “the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll” and that in 1998 Donald “had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan.”

Trump’s fans were conned into buying up his debt-laden properties and turning them into a public company. Trump, who plainly had no interest in running a casino and had demonstrated no corporate management skills during the prior decade, paid himself millions of dollars from the company’s coffers for doing essentially nothing. He then unloaded his third casino onto the public company at an inflated price.

The public company didn’t show a profit during a single year of its existence. In 2004 the stock was delisted and the company forced into Chapter 11 reorganization. It was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, but with Trump still at the helm it continued to pile up losses and amassed debts of nearly $2 billion. In 2008, after missing a $53 million bond payment, it declared bankruptcy yet again and Trump resigned as the company’s chairman. Its investors lost all their money.

In case you’re curious, this is how Trump treats the little people. Some of the investors in his casinos were big guns who should have known better. But plenty of them were moms and pops who believed Trump when he insisted he was the greatest businessman the world had ever known. Trump didn’t care: He figured he could fleece them, and he did. That’s what happens to people who trust Donald Trump.

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Here’s How Donald Trump Treats the Little People

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Cory Booker Takes a Veiled Jab at Bernie Sanders on Prisons

by LeslieWaterfield Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the only black Democrat in the Senate, took a subtle jab at Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Thursday for ignoring issues affecting African Americans in his own state of Vermont.

Campaigning for Hillary Clinton at a black church in Florence, South Carolina, on Thursday, Booker fired up the crowd with invocations of past violence against African Americas—from “gas and billy clubs” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the martyred teenager Emmett Till—while framing Clinton as the only candidate in the race voters could trust to fix the criminal justice system. “If you don’t mind all this talk in this campaign about race, I want to get real with y’all for a minute,” Booker said. His support for Clinton, he explained to the church audience, was because “she was here when it wasn’t election time. I’m here because she was supporting criminal justice reform before it was popular to talk about it on the campaign trail.”

In case the contrast he was trying to draw wasn’t clear, Booker got more specific. “This is not just a South Carolina issue,” he said. “I don’t care what state you come from. Heck, Vermont! People told me, ‘Cory, they don’t have black people in Vermont.’ I’m sorry to tell you this, there are 50 states; we got black people in every state! That’s true!”

He continued, “And the problems of racial disparity did not begin in this campaign. They go deep in every state. Vermont has 1 percent African Americans. But their prison population is 11 percent black! You want to speak about injustice—I see campaigns and candidates running all over this country. Don’t you come to my communities, talk about how much you care, talk your passion for criminal justice, and then I don’t hear from you after an election. And I didn’t hear from you before the election!”

Clinton has focused on winning black voters in counties where she lost big to Barack Obama (including Florence County, where Obama beat her by 42 points), emphasizing Sanders’ votes against gun control measures and her friendship with a group of African American women who lost their children to gun violence or in police custody. But her aggressive push on criminal justice is in part defensive; she’s been criticized on the left for supporting, among other things, welfare reform and the 1994 crime bill. At a fundraiser in Charleston on Wednesday night, she was confronted by a young black woman about comments she’d made as First Lady in support of the crime bill, alleging that “super-predators” were threatening urban communities. Clinton said on Thursday, “I shouldn’t have used those words.”

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Cory Booker Takes a Veiled Jab at Bernie Sanders on Prisons

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Which Cooking Oil Should You Use?

by EricCzwxojadq Posted on February 14, 2016

Almost every recipe starts with a splash of oil or a knob of butter in a pan, and you probably have a collection of slightly greasy, oil-filled bottles somewhere on a kitchen shelf. But not all of these cooking oils are made equal. Some are better for certain culinary tasks and have different environmental and even ethical impacts than others. Learn the differences and youll never look at cooking oils the same way again.

Olive Oil

There was a time when olive oil stayed within the Mediterranean region where three-quarters of the worlds olives are grown, but it has become one of the most popular oils in the United States, where 80 million gallons are consumed annually. The unfortunate result is that soil erosion has become a seriously problem because traditional agricultural practices cannot keep up with demand.

Olive oil is monounsaturated, liquid at room temperature and starting to turn solid when chilled. It has high levels of antioxidants, which you can taste in its peppery flavor. Olive oil comes in different ranges of refinement. Extra-virgin is the most highly prized, with a deep green color and rich taste.

Lighter olive oils (anything thats not extra-virgin) are not nearly as healthy, since theyve been heavily refined into nothingness, as Melissa explains inthis post. Most sources say that lighter olive oil are better for frying because they have a higher smoke point, but some say extra-virgin is more stable due to high polyphenolic content and is therefore perfectly good for frying.

Coconut Oil

Coconut oil has become the newest darling of the North American oil market. Solid at room temperature and liquid when heated, coconut oil is an easy vegan substitute for butter. It adds a wonderful and subtle coconut flavor to food.

Coconut oil is a saturated fat, which has long been maligned by health experts but is now being accepted as not deadly, perhaps even healthy. Saturated fats are not the nutritional enemy so much as excessive amounts of sugar and other refined carbohydrates. The BMJ even says that lowering our intake of saturated fat has paradoxically increased our cardiovascular risks (Huffington Post). Coconut oil, as with all saturated fats, keep you full longer, which means that a small amount goes a long way.

There are environmental impacts to consider, however, since the rapid increase in coconut oil demand has taken a toll on producers in Asia. UnfortunatelyFair Trade USA saysthat coconut farmers in the Philippines continue to live in poverty, despite the high cost of coconut products in the United States. Consumers should purchase onlyfair-trade coconut oilto ensure their purchase does not exploit the grower.

Vegetable Oil

Vegetable oil consists of oils such as safflower, sunflower, and soybean. These used to be staples in North American kitchens, together with animal fats, until olive oil arrived on the scenes in the 1980s. They have high smoke points, making them easy to cook with, and are produced in the United States and Canada.

There is a downside to vegetable oils. They have very little taste and little to no nutritional value. They contain high amounts of omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, and the extraction process uses a range of industrial chemicals and highly toxic solvents, including hexane gas. These are oils that many people say were never meant for human consumption, as they were only invented within the last century.

If buying vegetable oil, opt for organic whenever possible. According toRodales Organic Life:

Almost all soybean oil, unfortunately, comes from GMO crops, which stunt genetic diversity and require increased pesticide use. On the other hand, according to the National Sunflower Association, sunflower seeds are all GMO-free due to fear of cross-pollination with the wild population and the strict ban on GMOs in Europe, one of the words top producers. As for safflower oil, while currently non-GMO, new field tests of GMO safflower crops began in 2015.

Palm Oil

Palm oil in a nutshell:Avoid whenever possible!Palm oil is the reason for vast environmental destruction in Malaysia and Indonesia, the worlds primary palm oil producers. Rainforests are burned and razed to make room for lucrative palm oil plantations, which destroys habitat for animals such as the orangutan, generates huge amounts ofair-polluting smoke, and results in peat-bog fires that cannot be extinguished for decades.

Since palm oil is an incredibly versatile saturated fat that appears in nearly 50 percent of the items in the supermarket, from food to hygiene products, there are efforts to make its production more sustainable through tighter regulations and seals of approval. While these efforts are good, relatively few producers have chosen to become sustainable, which means that the effects are not widely felt.

Palm oil is similar to coconut oil in that its semi-solid at room temperature and makes a good vegan alternative to butter; its basically a form of vegetable shortening, good for frying, too.

Canola Oil

Canola oil comes from Canada, where it was invented in the years following World War 2. Its name means Canadian Oil, Low Acid. It is similar to vegetable oil in its mild taste, high smoke point, and low levels of saturated fat, which results in many of the same concerns (see previous slide).

Rodales Organic Life reports: Sadly, 96 percent of canola produced in Canada is GMO, and the number is similar for the United States. That said, organic is available, and its definitely worth the higher price tag.

Lard

Animal fat used to a kitchen staple, before the hydrogenation process was invented for domestically grown vegetable oils and exotic oils were imported from faraway places.

Lard is rendered pork fat. The process of rendering slowly cooks down the fatty layer on the meat until it turns to liquid, then it solidifies at room temperature to an even, smooth consistency that can be used for cooking.

The once-maligned lard is making a comeback as a growing number of people opt for saturated fats that require minimal processing and come from locally raised sources, although many vegans and vegetarians take obvious issue with lard. If you do try rendering your own lard (which is very easy), you should try to buy the pork fat from a reputable, organic-fed and free-range source in order to have higher quality fat with which to cook.

Butter

Thebutter vs. margarine debatehas once again flipped in favor of butter, the age-old standby of every kitchen. It is considered a real fat, not one that is created by an industrial process with added chemicals, which makes it appealing to the growing number of people wanting to eat a more natural, minimally processed diet.

Butter is full of saturated fat (with only 65% saturated compared to coconut oils 90%), and it only takes a bit of butter to make a big difference in flavor and calories.

There are obvious implications for vegans when it comes to butter, since its an animal product. If you do eat it, its worth considering the source of the butter you buy and trying to get the highest quality, preferably butter made from grass-fed cows.

Written by Katherine Martinko. Reposted with permission from TreeHugger.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Which Cooking Oil Should You Use?

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

by RogelioUnderwood Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’d forgotten about this even though I wrote about it two years ago, but here’s yet another chart about “deep poverty”:

In this case, deep poverty is defined as households with income under 50 percent of the poverty line (about $10,000 for a family of three). The calculation is based on more accurate measures of poverty that have since been endorsed by the Census Bureau.

Now, this is a different measure of poverty than the one used by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer that I noted yesterday. Their measure is both tighter (looking at even lower poverty rates) and looser (it counts households that are in extreme poverty even for short times). So it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, once you look at the historical numbers, it doesn’t look like the 1996 welfare reform act slowed down the growth of welfare spending, nor did it have more than a very small effect on deep poverty.

None of this is especially meant to defend welfare reform. But 20 years later, it doesn’t look like it really had quite the catastrophic impact that a lot of people were afraid of at the time.

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

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Sanders and Clinton Disagree on Climate. Why Won’t Debate Moderators Ask Them About It?

by VivienMcLendon9 Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If human civilization were facing a potentially existential threat, you’d probably want to know about what our leading candidates to run our country thought about it, right?

There was no question on climate change during Thursday night’s PBS-sponsored Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This, despite the Supreme Court dealing a meaningful, though likely temporary blow to the centerpiece of Obama’s climate policy on Tuesday and a defiant President Obama including a sweeping set of proposals to transition the nation’s transportation sector toward fossil-free sources of energy in his annual budget proposal on Wednesday.

This isn’t the first time moderators have ignored climate change. Back in December, just a few days after world leaders achieved the first-ever global agreement on climate change in Paris, Democratic debate moderators were silent. By my count, moderators have asked substantive questions on climate change in only half of the first six Democratic debates. That’s better than nothing, but given how consequential and urgent the topic is, I expect more.

Apparently, so do voters. In a Quinnipiac poll released on the day of the Iowa caucuses, 11 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers ranked climate change as their top issue, third only to the economy (36 percent) and health care (22 percent). Climate change ranked higher than terrorism, immigration, and gun policy combined. And caucus-goers who listed climate as their main concern broke for Sanders by a whopping 66 to 30 margin, almost certainly making the race there closer.

Perhaps one of the reasons climate doesn’t come up more in the debates is the conventional wisdom that Clinton and Sanders basically agree on the issue. But that’s simply not true. There are substantial differences between the two candidates.

Both agree that climate change is real and not a massive conspiracy between scientists and the government so that nerds can get rich stealing tax dollars. Both want to cut subsidies to fossil fuel companies and shift the country toward renewable energy (though neither to the level scientists say is necessary). At this point, these are basic staples of Democratic Party orthodoxy—and what casual observers already know.

Their differences, though, are substantial: Sanders’ climate plan is much more comprehensive than Clinton’s and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a faster rate. He’s forcefully linked climate change and terrorism. He’s staunchly opposed to continued fossil fuel exploration on public lands and has vowed to ban fracking outright, a stance Clinton doesn’t share. His focus on ridding politics of corporate lobbyists is a swipe against Clinton, whose campaign has taken money from fossil fuel companies. On the flip side, unlike Clinton, Sanders wants to phase out nuclear energy, a position that many scientists and environmentalists increasingly don’t share, given the need to transition toward a zero carbon economy as quickly as possible.

As for Clinton, though her presidential campaign was launched with a historic focus on climate, when she talks about climate change, it often feels like she’s playing catch-up. In recent months, Clinton has shifted her position to be more hawkish on Arctic drilling, the Keystone pipeline and on restricting fossil fuel exploration on public lands, likely in response to pressure from Sanders and voters.

When Sanders won New Hampshire this week, he devoted a big chunk of his victory speech to climate change. When Clinton conceded, she didn’t mention it once. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the New Hampshire winner (Donald Trump) is a climate conspiracy theorist. People often ask me if I feel hopeless about climate. Only when it’s not taken seriously.

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Sanders and Clinton Disagree on Climate. Why Won’t Debate Moderators Ask Them About It?

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Marcobot Has Apparently Exceeded Its Rated Mean Time to Failure

by JanelleWeldon2 Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oh hell, now I’m just starting to feel sorry for Marco Rubio. The whole Marcobot thing has apparently made him so self-conscious that he can barely even recite his stump speech anymore. Here he is delivering a line about values being rammed down our throats right after he’s just said it. There’s an almost poignant moment at 0:26 when Rubio suddenly realizes what he’s just done.

This reminds me of a Star Trek episode where Kirk uses some kind of sophomoric paradox to trick a computer into self destructing. That’s about what Chris Christie seems to have done to Rubio.

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Marcobot Has Apparently Exceeded Its Rated Mean Time to Failure

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Sunday French Fry Blogging

by KindraPVLC Posted on February 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few weeks ago I had lunch at my favorite diner and I asked what kind of oil they cooked their fries in. Corn oil, it turns out. But the owner of the place happened to be standing right there, and with no prompting he immediately grokked why I was asking:

Nobody makes fries the old way anymore. They used to be so good. These days—phhht. There’s no taste at all. But everybody got afraid of the health stuff, so it’s all vegetable oil now.

The fries at this place range from good to spectacular depending on the whims of the deep fryer, so it’s not impossible to get tasty fries from corn oil. Still, fries made in beef tallow—or a mixed oil that includes animal fat of some kind—are unquestionably better. So why hasn’t anyone picked up on this? There’s plenty of evidence suggesting that fries cooked in animal fat might be no worse for you than fries cooked in vegetable oil, and even if this is wrong there should still be a market for an “artisanal fries” menu item or some such. Upscale burger places are forever looking for ways to differentiate themselves for the foodie crowd, so why not this? I’d buy them.

It’s a mystery. Nobody should be afraid of some occasional fries cooked in animal fat. And if you are, nobody is going to take away your bland canola oil fries anyway. Someone needs to get on this bandwagon. Who will do it first?

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Sunday French Fry Blogging

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Is Academic Science Hopelessly Corrupt?

by TemekaSaxton84 Posted on February 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech scientist who uncovered the lead poisoning in Flint, is absolutely brutal about the way funding priorities have corrupted academic science:

We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill — pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index — and the idea of science as a public good is being lost. This is something that I’m upset about deeply. I’ve kind of dedicated my career to try to raise awareness about this. I’m losing a lot of friends.

….Q. Do you have any sense that perverse incentive structures prevented scientists from exposing the problem in Flint sooner?

A. Yes, I do. In Flint the agencies paid to protect these people weren’t solving the problem. They were the problem….I don’t blame anyone, because I know the culture of academia. You are your funding network as a professor. You can destroy that network that took you 25 years to build with one word. I’ve done it.

….Q. Now that your hypothesis has been vindicated, and the government has its tail between its legs, a lot of researchers are interested.

A. And I hope that they’re interested for the right reasons. But there’s now money — a lot of money — on the table….The expectation is that there’s tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to be made available by these agencies….I hate to sound cynical about it. I know these folks have good intentions. But it doesn’t change the fact that, Where were we as academics for all this time before it became financially in our interest to help? Where were we?

….Q. When is it appropriate for academics to be skeptical of an official narrative when that narrative is coming from scientific authorities? Surely the answer can’t be “all of the time.”

I grew up worshiping at the altar of science, and in my wildest dreams I never thought scientists would behave this way….Science should be about pursuing the truth and helping people. If you’re doing it for any other reason, you really ought to question your motives.

Unfortunately, in general, academic research and scientists in this country are no longer deserving of the public trust. We’re not.

In academia these day—and especially in the hard sciences, which are expensive to support—funding is everything. To a large extent, at big research universities faculty members basically work on commission: they have to bring in enough money to pay their own salaries and bankroll their own labs. And when was the last time a salesman on commission badmouthed his own product?

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Is Academic Science Hopelessly Corrupt?

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