Tag Archives: privacy-policy

Wooden Shjips’ "Ghouls" Takes You on a Psychadelic Journey

by TrinidadOctoman Posted on December 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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Track 3
“Ghouls,” from Wooden Shjips’ Back to Land
Thrill Jockey

Liner notes: Are you experienced? This echo-laden psychedelic rave-up simulates a thrilling journey into the great unknown.

Behind the music: Ripley Johnson launched this Bay Area band a decade ago, recruiting nonmusicians in an attempt to create new sounds. Featuring a more seasoned lineup, the band’s last album, West, pondered American mythology.

Check out if you like: Space travelers new (Melody’s Echo Chamber) and old (Syd Barrett).

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Wooden Shjips’ "Ghouls" Takes You on a Psychadelic Journey

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The Obamacare Website Wasn’t an Epic Disaster. It Just Didn’t Have Enough Time.

by Ameliankak Posted on December 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports today that heads are likely to roll over the Obamacare website fiasco:

For weeks, the president and his aides have said they are not interested in conducting a witch hunt in the middle of the effort to rescue the website. But in the West Wing, the desire for an explanation about how an administration that prides itself on competence bungled so badly remains an urgent mission.

“I assure you that I’ve been asking a lot of questions about that,” Mr. Obama said in a news conference last month, in comments that reverberated across the administration. The president warned, “There is going to be a lot of evaluation of how we got to this point.”

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with this: it might involve Obama having to take a good, long look in the mirror. At this point, it seems clear that development of the website wasn’t, in fact, some kind of comprehensive and unmitigated disaster. Quite the contrary. The basic design and architecture of the site seem to be fine. It’s now working fairly well, and all it took to get to this point was a couple of additional months of garden variety coding, testing, and bug fixing. If the developers had gotten that additional two or three months up front, they probably would have rolled out a pretty serviceable site on time.

And why was the development was so rushed? Lots of reasons, I’m sure, but reporting from multiple sources suggests that one of the big ones points straight back to the White House: Obama and his aides delayed issuing some of ACA’s final rules and specifications during the 2012 election season because they were afraid of Republican blowback. As a result, contractors didn’t start coding the site until early 2013, leaving only eight or nine months to complete the job. If that work had started even a few months earlier, it’s pretty clear that the site would have been at least tolerably usable by the October 1 rollout deadline.

I don’t doubt that a thorough audit will find fault in plenty of other places. Audits always do. And maybe there are people who screwed up badly enough that they deserve to be fired over it. But if politics played a role in this, some of those people might turn out to have pretty lofty job titles.

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The Obamacare Website Wasn’t an Epic Disaster. It Just Didn’t Have Enough Time.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 3, 2013

by Shannon Walters Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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1st Sgt. William Huston and Staff Sgt. Ronald Barker, paratroopers with Troop C, 2nd Squadron, 38th Calvary Regiment’s Long Range Surveillance, wait to reach altitude so they can jump static line with the new RA-1 parachute system at Fort Hood’s Rapido Drop Zone, Nov. 19. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Cody Barber, 11th Public Affairs Detachment.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 3, 2013

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DonorsTrust—the Right’s Dark-Money ATM—Pumps Out Record $96 Million

by 0xo4cdr4 Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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DonorsTrust is the conservative movement’s little-known but hugely influential cash machine, a conduit for millions of dollars in anonymous donations to anti-union legal shops, climate change deniers, pro-life advocates, libertarian think tanks, media watchdog groups, and a panoply of other right-leaning causes. Wealthy conservatives use DonorsTrust as a surefire way to invest their money, fingerprint-free, with the assurance it will end up in the right hands. According to new tax filings obtained by Mother Jones, DonorsTrust is growing increasingly popular among the bankrollers of the conservative movement.

Last year, DonorsTrust (and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund) doled out a record $96 million, making it one of the largest honeypots for right-leaning groups. That’s an increase from $85 million in 2011 and $78 million in 2010. DonorsTrust CEO Whitney Ball, who cofounded the group in 1999 and sometimes appears at the Koch brothers’ donor summits, says the increased giving stems from her organization’s growing profile and also conservative donors’ anger at the Obama administration. And despite worries about donor burnout within the conservative ranks, Ball says DonorsTrust is on track for another great year in 2013.

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DonorsTrust—the Right’s Dark-Money ATM—Pumps Out Record $96 Million

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Brief Daily Tests Might Be a Godsend for Low-Income College Students

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on December 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Via Joanne Jacobs, here’s an interesting research tidbit—highly preliminary and tentative, but still interesting. A couple of psychology professors at the University of Texas started giving students in their intro lecture course a brief online quiz in every single class session. They found that average grades went up modestly, both in their class and in other classes, though this was tricky to assess since previous classes had used different grading curves. However, the daily quizzes did unquestionably improve the relative performance of students from low-income homes:

There’s really not enough data from this one study to figure out why the delta between high and low-SES groups compressed with daily testing, but the researchers’ best guess is that the low-SES students benefited more from the daily, immediate feedback:

In our view, the patterns of improved performance across three outcomes (in Introductory Psychology, in other Fall classes, and in subsequent Spring classes) most plausibly reflect changes in students’ self-regulated learning — their ability to study and learn more effectively….In particular, students had to adopt reading, note-taking, and study habits that allowed them to keep up with the material. In talking with students, many noted how they had learned to set aside specific times to prepare for each class–something that they did not initially feel they needed to do for other classes. The repeated testing also broke the material into segments that required students to focus their attention on the relevant content and the immediate feedback after each quiz provided students with a constant and objective means with which to engage in productive self-evaluation. The daily quizzes also encouraged students to attend classes at higher rates.

In other words, the high-SES students had better average study habits to begin with, so the daily testing affected them only modestly. The low-SES students had poor study habits, and the daily testing made them face up to this early in their college careers and do something about it before it spiraled out of control. This affected not just their performance in the psychology class itself, but in the rest of their classes as well.

There are obviously a ton of confounding factors that could be at play here, but it’s an interesting result, well worth following up on.

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Brief Daily Tests Might Be a Godsend for Low-Income College Students

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 2, 2013

by VirgieSSSJ Posted on December 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Marines with the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, III Marine Expeditionary Force, wait on a C-130 Hercules prior to taking part in night jump training over Yokota Air Base, Japan, Nov. 21, 2013. The training not only allowed the Marines to practice jumping, but it also allowed the Yokota aircrews to practice flight tactics and timed-package drops. U.S. Air Force photo by Osakabe Yasuo/Released.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 2, 2013

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Judge Agrees to Resentence Rapist Who Got No Prison Time

by marinavhunt Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Following a national outcry, the Alabama judge who sentenced Austin Smith Clem to probation and no prison time for three rape convictions has agreed to reconsider the sentence. The judge, James Woodroof, filed an order Tuesday indicating his intention to resentence Clem. Brian Jones, the district attorney for Limestone County, in north central Alabama, had previously appealed the sentence as too lenient.

In September, a Limestone County jury found Clem, 25, guilty of raping Courtney Andrews, a teenage acquaintance and his then-neighbor, three times—twice when she was 14, and again when was she was 18. Clem’s defense attorney did not call any witnesses at trial. After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury returned guilty verdicts against Clem on one count of first-degree rape and two counts of second-degree rape.

On November 13, Woodroof ruled that Clem would be punished by serving two years in a program aimed at nonviolent criminals and three years of probation.

Clem’s victim, now 20, said she was “livid” when she first heard the verdict. Her case has since received national attention. On Sunday, she appeared on MSNBC, where she told Melissa Harris-Perry, “I need for him to be in prison. I’m not going to feel safe other than that.”

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Judge Agrees to Resentence Rapist Who Got No Prison Time

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Will Spike Lee’s Original Three-Hour Cut of "Oldboy" Ever See the Light of Day?

by Curtis Tangredi Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Tough fucking business.”

Those are the three words director Spike Lee used to explain the studio-led mangling of his latest film, Oldboy (FilmDistrict, 104 minutes).

The movie, which hits theaters on Wednesday, is a remake of Park Chan-wook‘s acclaimed 2003 South Korean revenge film of the same name. Lee’s version stars Josh Brolin as Joe Doucett, an alcoholic ad man and deadbeat father who is mysteriously abducted in 1993. He is held in a privately run detention facility (managed by a warden played by Samuel L. Jackson), where he learns he’s been framed for the rape and murder of his ex-wife. The authorities are hunting him, and his young daughter is placed into foster care. Twenty years later (a passage of time that Lee marks with clips of Clinton, Bush, 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Obama, and more), Joe is suddenly released, and embarks on a gore-filled mission to find his daughter, make his captors suffer, and discover why he was detained for two decades.

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Will Spike Lee’s Original Three-Hour Cut of "Oldboy" Ever See the Light of Day?

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WATCH: How a Canadian Town Is Teaching Polar Bears to Fear Humans in Order to Save Them

by Amy R. Eddy Posted on November 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Churchill in northern Manitoba bills itself as the the polar bear capital of the world and its tourism-based economy depends on it. But as climate change forces the polar bears inland in search of food, attacks on humans are increasing. Can this small community continue to co-exist with the world’s largest land predator? Suzanne Goldenberg reports from Churchill where its bear alert program uses guns, helicopters and a polar bear jail to manage the creatures.

This trip was supported by Explore.org, Polar Bears International, and Frontiers North

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WATCH: How a Canadian Town Is Teaching Polar Bears to Fear Humans in Order to Save Them

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FDA Reviewing Evidence That Morning-After Pill Doesn’t Work in Women Weighing Over 176 Pounds

by sreg2 Posted on November 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Monday morning, Mother Jones reported that the European manufacturer of an emergency contraceptive pill identical to Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, will warn women that the drug is completely ineffective in women weighing more than 176 pounds, and begins to lose effectiveness in women weighing more than 165 pounds. HRA Pharma, which makes the European drug, Norlevo, asked European regulators for permission to change the drug’s labeling after reviewing its own clinical data and scientific research from 2011 which showed emergency contraceptives are prone to fail in women with higher body mass indexes.

Now the Food and Drug Administration has responded to this story, telling Mother Jones that FDA officials are weighing whether pharmaceutical companies that sell similar emergency contraceptive pills in the US must change their labeling. Many popular morning-after pills sold in the US—including one-pill emergency contraceptives Plan B One-Step, Next Choice One Dose, and My Way, as well as a number of generic two-pill emergency contraceptives—are chemically identical to Norlevo, which also uses the chemical compound levonorgestrel to prevent pregnancy after sex.

“The FDA is currently reviewing the available and related scientific information on this issue, including the publication upon which the Norlevo labeling change was based,” FDA spokeswoman Erica Jefferson writes in an email. “The agency will then determine what, if any, labeling changes to approved emergency contraceptives are warranted.”

Jefferson declined to say when the FDA began its review. If FDA officials feel they have sufficient data to justify a change to product information, the FDA can order companies to update their labels. Jefferson adds that US drug companies have a legal obligation to alert the FDA if new information makes their existing labeling inaccurate.

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FDA Reviewing Evidence That Morning-After Pill Doesn’t Work in Women Weighing Over 176 Pounds

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