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Is Ben Carson a Liar? Or Does He Just Not Care?

by KashaBenoit8790 Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Ben Carson, wandering off topic when the Miami Herald asks him about abuses of our Cuba policy:

“I think the way to fix that is not so much to abolish the act, but dealing with the specific area where the abuse is,” Carson said, noting that Medicare and Medicaid fraud is “huge — half a trillion dollars.”

“We definitely need to focus on that,” he said.

Well, hell, why not say it’s a hundred trillion dollars? Or a gazillion? I mean, if you’re just going to make stuff up, why not go whole hog?

For the record, total Medicare and Medicaid spending last year—state, federal, everything—was $980 billion. So Carson is suggesting that literally half of all spending on these programs is fraudulent.

So where did Carson come up with this figure? Beats me. There are a few possibilities:

It comes from some kind of kooky right-wing conspiracy theory that circulates in newsletters and email lists that the rest of us never see.
Carson read somewhere that Medicare fraud totaled $60 billion out of half a trillion dollars, and the only parts that stuck in his brain were “fraud” and “half a trillion dollars.”
He just made it up.

This stuff is weird. Carson didn’t have to say anything about Medicare fraud. The question was about Cuba policy. He wanted to mention it. Fine. He could have just said that Medicare fraud was a huge problem. Sorry: not good enough. He wanted to toss out a scary number, but he couldn’t be bothered to know what it actually was—or even know enough about Medicare and Medicaid spending to realize that half a trillion dollars couldn’t possibly be right. He just doesn’t care. What kind of person running for president just doesn’t care?

POSTSCRIPT: Couldn’t Carson have just made a mistake? Sure. But here’s the thing: some mistakes are so big they give away the fact that you’re entirely ignorant of the subject at hand. If I told you that Babe Ruth hit 800 home runs in his career, it might just be a brain fart. But if I told you he hit 5,000 home runs, it’s a giveaway that I’m faking. I don’t know the first thing about baseball.

That’s what Carson did here. He’s smart and good with numbers, so if he knew even the basics of Medicare and Medicaid he’d also know intuitively that half a trillion dollars couldn’t be right. But he didn’t. He’s running for president, and hasn’t bothered to learn even the kindergarten basics about two programs that make up nearly a third of the federal budget.

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Is Ben Carson a Liar? Or Does He Just Not Care?

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Fabulous New Blood Test Technology Not Quite as Fabulous as Advertised

by PhillisLqs Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, when I was getting my blood drawn with dismaying frequency, I sang the praises of Elizabeth Holmes, a young billionaire who founded a company that promises to perform lab tests with only as much blood as you get from a finger prick. That sounded great.

My blood tests have gotten much less frequent these days, and I’ve mostly gotten over my needle phobia anyway,1 so I haven’t paid much attention to Theranos, the Silicon Valley darling Holmes founded. But this morning, John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos was basically a house of cards. It actually does very little testing using its “Edison” finger-prick technology, and has had trouble getting FDA approval for its tests due to questions about the accuracy of its results.

Tonight, Carreyrou reports that things are even worse than that:

Under pressure from regulators, laboratory firm Theranos Inc. has stopped collecting tiny vials of blood drawn from finger pricks for all but one of its tests….That test detects herpes and was cleared by the FDA in July.

….Theranos has since nearly stopped using the lab instrument, named Edison after the prolific inventor, according to the person familiar with the situation. By the time of the FDA inspection, the company was doing blood tests almost exclusively on traditional lab instruments purchased from diagnostic-equipment makers such as Siemens AG , the person says.

….Most of Theranos’s blood-drawing sites, which it calls “wellness centers,” are located inside Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. drugstores….A blood-drawing technician at a Walgreens in the Phoenix area, reached by phone late Thursday, said Theranos had “temporarily suspended” finger-prick draws and was only drawing blood from patients’ arms with needles at that store.

That doesn’t sound very promising. I have a feeling that Elizabeth Holmes might not make the Forbes list of billionaires next year. She might be lucky if Theranos even still exists.

1So far, the upsides of my chemotherapy have been (1) better hair, (2) weight loss2, (3) less dread of blood draws, (4) forbidden to clean the litter box,3 and (5) the purchase of a powered bed, which is really cool.

2Though, sadly, I’ve gained most it back.

3Though, sadly, I’ve since been given permission to do this again.

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Fabulous New Blood Test Technology Not Quite as Fabulous as Advertised

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Prosecutors Dealt a Setback in Trial of Rand Paul Aides

by LilianaCSSW Posted on October 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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An Iowa judge dealt a setback to prosecutors who have accused several Paul family political operatives of breaking campaign finance laws during Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. The judge ruled on Friday that all the charges filed against John Tate, a longtime Paul family operative who worked for both Ron and Rand Paul and for groups tied to the family’s political causes, should be dismissed. During the 2012 election, Tate was in charge of America’s Liberty PAC, a pro-Rand Paul super-PAC endorsed by the Kentucky senator. Several of the charges against Jesse Benton, who is married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter and also involved with America’s Liberty PAC, were also dropped. But Benton and a third Paul lieutenant, Dimitri Kesari, are still both scheduled to go to trial next week.

This case focuses on these operatives’ roles running the 2012 Ron Paul campaign and an apparent plan to pay an Iowa state senator to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul. The state senator, Kent Sorenson, initially denied there was a scheme to pay him to back Ron Paul, but eventually he admitted that he took money from the Paul campaign through a third party (to cover the campaign’s tracks). He pleaded guilty last year to federal campaign finance charges and is awaiting sentencing. On Friday, federal judge John Jarvey, dismissed all the charges against Tate and all but one of the charges against Benton, saying that in presenting charges to the grand jury, prosecutors improperly included accusations that Benton and Tate lied about their involvement in the case during meetings with investigators and prosecutors.

The judge’s decision was apparently based on complaints by Benton and Tate’s respective lawyers that the government convinced a grand jury to indict them by using statements the men made when they were under the impression that prosecutors wouldn’t use these remarks against them. According to court documents, last summer, before a grand jury was convened, the two men met, separately, with investigators and prosecutors in what is known as “proffer sessions”—meetings in which the subject of the interview is usually given some immunity and a promise the government won’t use what they tell investigators against them. The one instance in which statements made during a proffer session can be used to prosecute the interviewee is when the government prosecutes the person directly for making false statements to federal investigators. The charges against Tate and Benton that were dismissed today were related to conspiracy and campaign finance violations. The judge ruled that it was improper for prosecutors to bring up what Benton and Tate said in the proffer sessions when accusing them of those crimes.

Benton is still charged with making false statements to federal investigators and Kesari still faces six charges relating to the case, including conspiracy and campaign finance charges. Prosecutors also claim he tried to convince Sorenson to not cooperate with investigators.

Neither Benton nor Tate’s attorney responded to requests for comment, but Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said new charges may still be filed against Tate and Benton.

“The government is free to proceed to trial—and informed the court today that it will proceed to trial—on the remaining counts pertaining to Benton and Kesari,” Carr said. “The decision regarding the dismissed counts will be made at a later date post trial.”

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Prosecutors Dealt a Setback in Trial of Rand Paul Aides

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Here Is a Study About Sad Little Men Having Affairs for Sad, Boring Reasons

by Kelle08Lrfcb Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Society tells us that men are supposed to go out into the world and earn the wages while women are supposed to stay at home and raise kids. Society, as many great thinkers have said, is stupid. It’s all very 1950s and Revolutionary Road and most people not from the fever swamp would acknowledge that these gender roles are detrimental to the world and terrible and dumb. Still, the pernicious effects remain in our psyche! Now, you can either believe that even the most enlightened people are still sick on some deep down interior level, or you can be the sort of person who doesn’t believe things, but either way it’s true.

How true is it? This true:

This new study, showcased in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, found that men who are 100% economically dependent on their spouses were most at risk for cheating, three times more at risk than women married to male breadwinners.

While, on average, women who are completely financially dependent on their husbands face about a 5% chance that they will stray, there is about a 15% chance that a man married to a female breadwinner will cheat, the study concluded.

“I think it has to do with our cultural notions of what it means to be a man and what … the social expectations are for masculinity,” the study author, Christin Munsch, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, told CNN.

Being economically dependent on their wives may threaten their manhood, Munsch said, and having an affair is a way to re-establish their masculinity, even if it’s all done subconsciously.

God is a lazy screenwriter.

UPDATE:

No.

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Here Is a Study About Sad Little Men Having Affairs for Sad, Boring Reasons

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This Arizona Lawmaker Bravely Revealed Her Sexual Assault to Fight a Restrictive Abortion Bill

by ChristiArcher Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Arizona state Rep. Victoria Steele (D) revealed during emotional testimony Wednesday that she was molested by a male relative when she was a young girl. Steele, who was speaking against a bill that would make it harder for women to elect abortion coverage in plans bought through the Affordable Care Act, hadn’t planned to talk about her past abuse, she explained later. But when committee chair Kelly Townsend asked her whether she felt abortion was a medical service, she felt compelled to share her experience.

“When I was a child, I was molested for years by one particular person,” Steele testified. “This is health care. Having the ability to get an abortion. This is health care. And that’s why I see this as necessary.”

Steele said she later found out there were multiple victims, one of whom told her their molester had told her he would “stick a pencil up there and take care of it” if she ever ended up pregnant.

After Steele’s testimony, a state House committee approved the bill by a 5-3 party-line vote. The bill now faces a vote before the full House.

In an editorial for Cosmopolitan published on Friday, Steele said she expected the bill to survive further debate, but explained why she thinks it’s dangerous for women’s rights:

I was sexually abused by an adult over a period of years when I was a young girl. My immediate family didn’t know about this until long after I had grown up and left home. When I was a child, I thought I was the only one. Then I found out that this person had many victims.

What I want, what I’m really hoping will come of all of this is that people will realize that this bill will cause women who have been raped recently, who are now pregnant as a result of their rape, to have to tell their insurance panel, or even their insurance agent, about one of the most horrific things that can happen to a person in order to get the exception that this bill will allow.

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This Arizona Lawmaker Bravely Revealed Her Sexual Assault to Fight a Restrictive Abortion Bill

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Terrifying Video Shows Black Man "With His Hands Raised" Shot To Death By New Jersey Cop

by WilmaMullings Posted on January 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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A newly released dashcam recording shows a New Jersey police officer fatally shooting a black man whose hands were raised in the air.

The fatal encounter stems from a routine traffic stop on December 30, in which Bridgeton officers Braheme Days and Roger Worley pulled over a vehicle for running through a stop sign.

While questioning the two men, Leroy Tutt and Jerame Reid, the video shows Days suddenly shouting to his partner, “We’ve got a gun in his glove compartment!”

“Show me your fucking hands,” Days, who appears to recognize Reid as he his heard calling him by his first name, warns. “He’s reaching for something!”

As the situation intensifies, Reid can be heard telling the officers, “I’m not reaching for nothing. I ain’t got no reason to reach for nothing.” He then tells Days, “I’m getting out and getting on the ground.”

Reid gets up and exits the car with his hands raised. Then the two officers fire at least six shots, killing Reid.

“The video speaks for itself that at no point was Jerame Reid a threat and he possessed no weapon on his person,” Walter Hudson of the civil rights group National Awareness Alliance said Wednesday.

According to records, Reid was in prison for 13 years for shooting at a state trooper when he was a teenager.

On Tuesday, the Bridgeton Police Department expressed its disappointment over the video’s release “out of respect for the family.” An investigation into the fatal shooting is being conducted.

The recording comes amid reports the Ferguson police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown will be cleared of federal civil rights charges. The August shooting sparked massive protests around the country with the chant, “Hands up, don’t shoot” serving as a symbolic call for justice in Brown’s death.

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Terrifying Video Shows Black Man "With His Hands Raised" Shot To Death By New Jersey Cop

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Europe Wants To Make Its Memory Hole Global

by SalinaR35rp Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Europe’s infamous right to be forgotten is on track to become truly Orwellian:

Europe’s privacy regulators want the right to be forgotten to go global. In a new set of guidelines agreed Wednesday in Brussels, the body representing the EU’s 28 national privacy regulators said that search engines should apply the bloc’s new right to be forgotten to all of their websites.

….Google may consider a way to apply the ruling on Google.com without applying it globally … by returning different results depending on whether the person is searching from an Internet Protocol address located within the EU. But it is unclear if such a move would satisfy regulators, as it would only make it harder to sidestep the ruling inside the EU, not globally.

“These are fundamental rights. My rights don’t go away at the border,” one data-protection official said of the idea of using IP addresses to apply the rule.

I understand that the EU has a more expansive view of personal privacy than the US and other countries. What’s more, I’m generally on their side in this battle when it comes to truly personal information. Both corporate and government collection of personal buying habits, internet browsing patterns, and so forth deserve to be reined in.

But here we’re talking about largely public information. It’s bad enough that the EU is insisting that people not only have a right to control genuinely personal data, but also have a right to shape attitudes and perceptions that are based on public record. It’s even worse that they’re now trying to impose this absurdity on the entire planet. If they insist on having a continent-wide memory hole, I guess that’s their business. But they sure don’t have the right to foist their insistence on artificially altering reality on the rest of us. Enough’s enough.

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Europe Wants To Make Its Memory Hole Global

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Arizona State’s Chip Sarafin Just Became the First Publicly Gay Player in Major College Football

by Roderic2845 Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Arizona State University offensive lineman Edward “Chip” Sarafin revealed he is gay in a newly published magazine profile, making him the first active player in major college football to come out publicly.

Although his conversation with Compete—a Tempe-based LGBT sports magazine—marks the first time Sarafin has told his story to the media, he said he came out to his teammates last spring. “It was really personal to me,” he said, “and it benefited by peace of mind greatly.”

Sarafin, who is a fifth-year senior earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, has not played in a game in his four years as a Sun Devil. With his announcement, he follows in the steps of current St. Louis Rams linebacker Michael Sam, who came out to the media after completing his college football career at the University of Missouri, and the University of Massachusetts’ Derrick Gordon, who became the first openly gay men’s college basketball player just months ago. Sam tweeted his support shortly after the news broke:

Arizona State football coach Todd Graham had this to say about Sarafin in a statement Wednesday:

We are a brotherhood that is not defined by cultural and personal differences, but rather an individual’s commitment to the Sun Devil Way. Chip is a fifth-year senior and a Scholar Baller, a graduate and a master’s student. His commitment to service is unmatched and it is clear he is on his way to leading a successful life after his playing career, a goal that I have for every student-athlete. Diversity and acceptance are two of the pillars of our program, and he has full support from his teammates and the coaching staff.

Sarafin, who plans to become a neurologist, is currently helping develop a lightweight, sturdy carbon-fiber football helmet. He does outreach with younger athletes, educating them on the dangers of playing through concussions. He says he strives to be the type of person who “gives back to everyone and loves his family.”

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Arizona State’s Chip Sarafin Just Became the First Publicly Gay Player in Major College Football

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The Incredible Thing About Whale Poop Is That It Fights Climate Change

by AleidaXloxni Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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

It’s not a good time to be living in the ocean. Aside from oil spills and the scourge of plastics pollution, the seas are becoming ever more acidic due to humanity’s CO2 flooding the atmosphere. The altered PH of the water makes for a bevy of problems, from making fish act in really weird ways to dissolving the shells of creatures critical to the marine food chain.

But a group of scientists from the University of Vermont and elsewhere think the ocean’s future health has one thing going for it: the restoration of whale populations. They believe that having more whales in the water creates a more stable marine environment, partly through something called a “whale pump”—a polite term for how these majestic animals defecate.

Commercial hunting of great whales, meaning the baleen and sperm variety, led to a decline in their numbers as high as 66 percent to 90 percent, the scientists write in a new study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. This mammalian decimation “likely altered the structure and function of the oceans,” says lead author Joe Roman, “but recovery is possible and in many cases is already under way.”

The researchers—who are whale biologists—present a couple of arguments for how these animals help secure the climate-threatened ocean. The first is their bathroom behavior: After feeding on krill in the briny deep, whales head back to the surface to take massive No. 2s. You can see the “pumping” process in action amid this group of sperm whales off the coast of Sri Lanka:

Tony Wu/University of Vermont

You have to feel for the person who took that photo. But these “flocculent fecal plumes” happen to be laden with nutrients and are widely consumed by plankton, which in turn takes away carbon from the atmosphere when they photosynthesize, die, and wind up on the ocean floor. A previous study of the Southern Ocean, to cite just one example, indicated that sperm-whale defecation might remove hundreds of thousands of tons of atmospheric carbon each year by enhancing such plankton growth. Thus, these large whales “may help to buffer marine ecosystems from destabilizing stresses” like warmer temperatures and acidification, the researchers claim.

The other nice thing whales do for the climate is eat tons of food and then die. In life, they are fantastic predators. But in death, their swollen bodies are huge sarcophagi for carbon. When the Grim Reaper comes calling, whales sink and sequester lots and lots of carbon at the bottom of the sea, like this dearly departed fellow:

Craig Smith/University of Vermont

While there’s no exact measurement of how these “whale falls” impact global carbon sequestration—and some argue it can’t have that big of an effect—Roman thinks it’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about protecting these vulnerable creatures. As he told an Alaskan news station last year, “This may be a way of mitigating climate change, if we can restore whale populations throughout the world.”

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The Incredible Thing About Whale Poop Is That It Fights Climate Change

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“You’ll Need to Relearn How to Be a Person”: A Letter to Bowe Bergdahl From a Fellow Former Hostage

by MirtaFarkas Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Bowe Bergdahl, you are now free, but many of your problems are just beginning. You have left a world of extreme isolation and entered one that is vastly more complex. It will be hard for you to adjust. Anyone who spends a significant amount of time as a prisoner comes out handicapped. This would be true whether you were held by the Taliban or anyone else. And along with all that, you will have to cope with being an odd celebrity.

You will have infinitely more support than most prisoners do when they are released. People will recognize you on the street and welcome you home. But you’ll soon discover that others, in op-eds, blogs, and emails, say terrible things. You’ll find that many are blaming you for your own captivity. Ironically, these are generally people who feel very strongly that your captors are their enemies. Some of them think you should be punished further. You’ll see that many blame you for the deaths of American soldiers, rather than blame the war itself. Blaming the victim is always a way to protect the powerful.

When you get back to the United States, people will ask you over and over, in confidential and heartfelt tones, how you are doing. When they ask, they will look you in the eyes to show you they understand. You will not be able to give an answer that feels true, possibly because you will grow annoyed with such questions, but also because “great” and “awful” will probably both be true at once, though you won’t really understand the awful part.

You will get unreasonably angry at times, even when your life is good. You will carry a strange tension around that you never felt before, one that is unlike the anxiety and fear you felt in captivity. You might develop new nervous ticks. You’ll probably feel tempted to drink more than usual. You might have problems with your memory.

Chances are you will feel anxious in crowds. It may be hard for you to make choices for a while without being told what to do. You will be wracked with guilt for a thousand things. That, or you’ll feel nothing. There will be something you’ll come to miss about captivity, though you might keep this a secret—there, the source of your problems were clear. Now that you’re free, they won’t make sense.

Some people—strangers—will become oddly emotional around you. You’ll come to learn that some relate their own crises to yours and they’ll look to you for answers that you won’t possess. You’ll find that the person many see when they look at you isn’t really you, and this will be awkward.

Some will relate to you as a hero for walking off the military base (if that is what you in fact did; we don’t yet know), which might feel supportive, but also uncomfortable. Some will treat you as a hero for being a soldier, which, if you were in fact disillusioned with the military, might also make you uncomfortable. You will come to understand that you are now a symbol and a story, and you’ll need to relearn how to be a person.

For years to come, people will tell you dreadful things they’ve been through when they first meet you. Some will preface their stories by saying things like, “Of course this doesn’t compare to your situation, but…” Others won’t preface anything. Some will probably tell you things far worse than anything you’ve ever experienced. Eventually, strangers will forget your face and you’ll enjoy your anonymity (while missing the attention).

You’ll find yourself trying carefully not to bring up your captivity, not because you have such a hard time talking about it, but because you want to enjoy your dinner or the party or the company of friends without someone telling you yet another terrible story. You’ll learn how to condense your own experience into sound bites that can wrap everything up in a few minutes and leave the listener feeling satisfied.

It’s impossible to say what is best for another person, but what helped me when I was released after 26 months of captivity in Iran was to find others who have been through similar experiences. Through them, you will see that your confusion is not unusual. When I got out of prison, I found solace in conversations with other Americans who had been wrongfully detained, from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.

I also connected with people who were wrongfully convicted in the United States, some getting out after more than 20 years behind bars. I related to a former Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Errachidi, who was detained without trial, did three years in solitary, and was released six years after being captured. When I called him up in Morocco and he told me he was having a hard time feeling happy, feeling like he had his life back, I felt less alone.

More likely than not, you will give a press conference or interviews at some point. If you do, you will find that many want to shape your story for you, and this will be hard to navigate. You’ll also realize that, for most everyone else, your story hinges on a moment four years ago—did you, or did you not walk off the base?—as if that would explain everything. Embedded in the question will be a subtle suggestion that if you did, you might have deserved being held captive for four years with the Taliban. This question will be disappointing, though you will answer it so many times that your answer will become rote. For you, of course, the moment you were taken captive will feel like the distant past.

If I could say one thing to you, it would be this: Getting free is complicated. It is difficult. Sometimes unbearable. But this will pass. Just like you slowly adjusted to being a prisoner, you will slowly adjust to being free. And several times, you will think you have adjusted, then you will realize that you haven’t.

This will keep happening, for so long that you will think that you are permanently damaged. You are not. It will be hard at first to make your own decisions, but you will learn. People will want you to do things that you don’t want to do, even people close to you. You don’t need to do them. Your decisions are no longer matters of life and death. You are free now.

If you want to chat, hit me up. Seriously.

P.S. To my fellow journalists:

It would be nice—though its hard to imagine—if the media didn’t descend on Bowe Bergdahl like a pack of wolves. When I was released from Iran, some journalists tried to squeeze their way onto my flight home. One tried to embed with our families as they waited for Josh’s and my release, even though our relatives were very clear that they did not want this.

There are some things more important than a scoop. Nothing special will be added to the world if you are the first person to interview this man; you will only satisfy your own ego. He is new to the world. He is going through the slow process of coming to grips with freedom, to being able to function on his own. Don’t prey on him. Give him a chance.

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“You’ll Need to Relearn How to Be a Person”: A Letter to Bowe Bergdahl From a Fellow Former Hostage

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