Tag Archives: privacy-policy

Corn on "Last Word": Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Hated Congress

by Caroline73G Posted on January 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mother Jones DC bureau chief David Corn joins EJ Dionne and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ new memoir. In the book, Gates describes how much he hated testifying before Congress.

David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He’s also on Twitter.

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Corn on "Last Word": Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates Hated Congress

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Check Out This Shocking Map of California’s Drought

by nension Posted on January 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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NASA GRACE Data Assimilation. Click to embiggen.

While the country’s appetite for extreme weather news was filled (to the brim) this week by the polar vortex, spare a thought for sunny California, where exceptionally dry weather is provoking fears of a long, tough summer ahead.

The state is facing what could be its worst drought in four decades. The chart above, released by the National Drought Mitigation Center on Monday, shows just how dry the soil is compared to the historical average: the lighter the color, the more “normal” the current wetness of the soil; the darker the color, the rarer. You can see large swathes of California are bone dry.

Nearly 90 percent of the state is suffering from severe or extreme drought. A statewide survey shows the current snowpack hovering below 20 percent of the average for this time of year. The AP is reporting that if the current trend holds, state water managers will only be able to deliver 5 percent of the water needed for more than 25 million Californians and nearly a million acres of farmland.

A study published in Nature Climate Change at the end of last year found that droughts will probably set in more quickly and become more intense as climate change takes hold.

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Check Out This Shocking Map of California’s Drought

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Chart of the Day: Being Poor Is Bad for Your Health

by Jeff Howard Posted on January 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hypoglycemia is an ever-present threat among diabetics who are being treated with insulin injections. Generally speaking, it’s caused by inadequate nutrition leading to dangerously low blood sugar, and it can usually be fixed by simply eating enough. But what if you’re poor, and at the end of the month you don’t have enough money left to buy adequate food? Adrianna McIntyre passes along this devastatingly simple chart that shows exactly what happens:

Take a look at the top three lines. Among those with high incomes, the risk of hypoglycemia is about the same all month long. But the red line shows the incidence of hypoglycemia among the poor. It goes down at the beginning of the month, when money is available for food, rises a bit in the middle of the month, and then jumps dramatically in the final week when money is tight. As a check to make sure that tight budgets really are at fault, the authors ran the same test on the incidence of appendicitis, which should be unrelated to income. It was.

McIntyre uses this as an object lesson: although policy wonks tend to focus a lot of attention on insurance and health care financing, there are plenty of other things that affect health. What’s more, solutions aren’t simple:

These findings also illustrate the difficulty in finding policy solutions to address health disparities. The authors note that food pantries and soup kitchens already ramp up staffing and resources toward the end of the month. We could explore different ways to distribute existing benefits, but that may have other negative impacts (ie: making it harder to pay rent or bills at the beginning of the month).

Nothing is ever easy.

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Chart of the Day: Being Poor Is Bad for Your Health

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Gates Says Obama Gave Up On Afghanistan Three Years Ago

by BrandiNic Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has published a memoir of his time in government. He served in Obama’s cabinet for two years:

Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Mr. Gates said, Mr. Obama opened with a blast of frustration over his Afghan policy — expressing doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Gates was frustrated about this, and I don’t blame him. And needless to say, conservatives are going to have a field day with it.

But it’s pretty frustrating for those of us on the other side of the fence as well. Apparently, we’ve spent the past three years fighting a war that the White House no longer believes in. There’s been essentially no hope of victory, or even of doing much good, and yet we gutted it out anyway. What a waste.

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Gates Says Obama Gave Up On Afghanistan Three Years Ago

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

by KatlynEarnhardt Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Is life expectancy a good measure of the quality of a country’s health care system? I’ve always been pretty hesitant to use it as a primary metric because….well, I’ll just let Aaron Carroll describe people like me:

One of my issues with the arguments people muster against life expectancy is that they are all so small. They attack some individual behavior or factor that might affect life expectancy in some minimal way, but nowhere near enough to cause the big differences we see. It’s smoking. It’s drinking. It’s accidents. It’s immigrants. It’s chemicals in the water. It’s stupidity. It’s suicide. It’s freedom.

It doesn’t matter that tons of these arguments are just plain wrong. It doesn’t matter that even after you eliminate them from the equation, our life expectancy still sucks. People hold on to them like crazy because they don’t want to believe that it could be the health care system.

OK, OK, maybe I should take life expectancy more seriously as a metric of health care quality. It’s certainly true that American life expectancy, which largely tracked other rich countries in the years after World War II, diverged rather dramatically starting around 1990. Why? It’s true that there could be a thousand different reasons related to culture and food and violence and so forth, but most of those things existed all along. So what happened around 1990?

One plausible answer is that it’s related to divergences in health care starting around then. That’s a tricky thing to prove, however, unless you dig deeply into the details. Recently a team of authors did just that in JAMA and produced the chart below. It shows Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL) as multiples of the median for other rich countries. A number greater than one means we’re losing more years than the rest of our peers. Here’s the chart:

The dramatic thing about this chart is that the United States does worse than other rich countries in every single area. Sure, it’s possible that there are 16 different reasons that we’re doing worse in 16 different categories, but it doesn’t seem likely, does it? When something is this widespread, the cause is a lot more likely to be something broadly based, like health care delivery. This isn’t smoking gun proof that our Rube Goldberg health care system is responsible for our lousy life expectancy, but it sure ought to make you sit up and take notice. There’s a pretty good chance that you, your friends, and your family are going to live three or four years less than you should, solely because you live in America.

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

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Mississippi GOP Senate Candidate Blames Hip-Hop for Gun Violence (AUDIO)

by ValorieRodrigue Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a promotional segment for his Christian conservative radio program, Right Side Radio, Mississippi Republican Senate candidate Chris McDaniel blamed rising gun violence on a “hip-hop” culture that “values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry.”

The comments were featured in a teaser for the program, which McDaniel hosted from 2004 to 2007, and recently flagged by the politics blog Darkhorse Mississippi. McDaniel, a state senator who has the backing of prominent tea party and conservative groups, is challenging Sen. Thad Cochran in June’s Republican primary.

“The reason Canada is breaking out with brand new gun violence has nothing to do with the United States and guns,” McDaniel said in this promotional sampler for his syndicated radio show. “It has everything to do with a culture that is morally bankrupt. What kind of culture is that? It’s called hip-hop.”

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Mississippi GOP Senate Candidate Blames Hip-Hop for Gun Violence (AUDIO)

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We Could Do a Lot More to Fight Poverty If We Wanted To

by Lovell Mao Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today is the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s war on poverty, so we’ll be getting a lot of retrospectives. CBPP has a whole series of charts here, and they’re worth a look. Child poverty is way down since 1963, which is a big win, and elderly poverty is down too, which is a big win for Social Security.

But at the risk of being a buzzkill, I want to reprint a chart I put up last month. It answers a simple question: if you count income from all the welfare programs we’ve put in place over the past half century, how have working-age folks done? The answer is in the red line in the chart below. The Great Society programs of the 60s got the working-age poverty rate down from 20 percent to 15 percent, but then we gave up. Since the mid-70s, the poverty rate has stayed stubbornly stuck at about 15 percent:

This is a chart to really keep in mind as you read the inevitable retrospectives. The overall poverty rate has gone down substantially in the past half century, but that’s largely because of the huge effect of Social Security on elderly poverty. But as much as this is a great achievement, it’s not what most people think of when you talk about “poverty.” Rather, they’re mostly thinking of working-age people who are either unemployed or earning tiny wages. And among those people, we simply haven’t done much for the past 40 years.

It’s probably not possible to eliminate poverty, or even to get it down to 5 percent or so. But we could do more if we wanted. We could make Medicaid more generous. We could raise the minimum wage and the EITC. We could, at an absolute minimum, decide not to cut food stamps. We could do all these things. All we need is a bit of empathy for the worst off among us and the will to do something about it.

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We Could Do a Lot More to Fight Poverty If We Wanted To

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Planet Likely to Warm by 4C by 2100

by Leon51tt8 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Temperature rises resulting from unchecked climate change will be at the severe end of those projected, according to a new scientific study.

The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4°C by 2100, twice the level the world’s governments deem dangerous.

The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change.

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Planet Likely to Warm by 4C by 2100

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Friday Cat Blogging – 3 January 2014

by LynwoodDaigle Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Domino is exhausted from an entire year of posing with quilts, so she’s upstairs taking a well-deserved nap. Instead, we have a guest cat to kick off the new year. This is a friend’s feline furball, cleverly named Grayson. Handsome little beast, isn’t he?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 3 January 2014

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NSA Paid Security Company to Adopt Weakened Encryption Standards

by BrennaKGTB Posted on December 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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A few months ago, we learned via the Snowden leaks that the NSA had been busily at work trying to undermine public cryptography standards. One in particular was a random number generator used for creating encryption keys in RSA’s BSafe software. But Reuters reports there’s more to the story:

Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.

….Most of the dozen current and former RSA employees interviewed said that the company erred in agreeing to such a contract, and many cited RSA’s corporate evolution away from pure cryptography products as one of the reasons it occurred.

But several said that RSA also was misled by government officials, who portrayed the formula as a secure technological advance. “They did not show their true hand,” one person briefed on the deal said of the NSA, asserting that government officials did not let on that they knew how to break the encryption.

Well, look. There are a very limited number of reasons that the NSA would be so eager for you to use their encryption software that they’d be willing to pay you $10 million to do it. Surely someone at RSA must have had some inkling of what was going on.

Probably more than an inkling, if I had to guess. But this certainly goes to show just how serious and relentless the NSA has been about crippling the public use of cryptography. The president’s surveillance commission recommended on Friday that this stop, and since trustworthy encryption is critical to trust in the internet as a whole, it would sure be nice of President Obama put a stop to this.

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NSA Paid Security Company to Adopt Weakened Encryption Standards

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