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Scientists Can Predict Your City’s Obesity Rate by Analyzing Its Sewage

by AdalberOreilly Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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If someone were to ask you what distinguishes skinny cities with from fat ones, you might think of the prevalence of fast food joints, the average length of automobile commutes, or the relative abundance of parks and jogging trails. But there’s also another, more underground factor: their sewage.

More MoJo coverage of bacteria and health:


Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?


This Is Your Body on Microbes


Should You Take a Probiotic?


Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants


Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?


Antibiotics As Key to Curing Starvation


Why You Shouldn’t Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

Researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee collected raw sewage samples from the intakes of municipal wastewater treatment plants in 71 cities around the country. Their results, published last month in mBio, the American Society for Microbiology’s open-access journal, showed that the microbial content of that sewage predicted each city’s relative obesity with 81 to 89 percent accuracy.

The finding actually isn’t all that surprising, says lead author Ryan Newton, a visiting professor at UW’s School of Freshwater Sciences. Other studies have shown that bacterial imbalances in your intestines can lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes. Newton’s study, however, is the first to demonstrate that those microbial differences also play out across entire populations, even after our poop gets flushed, mixed together, and sent through miles of pipes.

The UW study was enabled by computing advances have allowed scientists to rapidly sequence microbial populations and look for patterns in the results. Other researchers are using similar techniques to look for correlations between gut bacteria and a wide range of health conditions.

Newton isn’t the only scientist who sees sewage as a promising place for data dives. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Underworlds project, which began in January, will study sewage for the presence of viruses such as influenza and polio; bacterial pathogens that cause cholera typhoid fever, and other diseases; and biochemical molecules ranging from antibiotics to illegal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. Scientists hope the resulting data could help predict epidemics and track other public health trends within particular neighborhoods.

As scientists gain a better understanding of the interplay between microbes and human health, they may eventually be able to look at municipal sewage to figure out which communities would be the best to target with public health campaigns designed to, say, get people to eat less sugar or more vegetables.

And just as important, sequencing sewage could eliminate the thorny problem of doing public health surveys. Unlike people, your poop can’t lie about what you had to eat.

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Scientists Can Predict Your City’s Obesity Rate by Analyzing Its Sewage

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5 Ways You Can Live Forever

by PNTImogengbpfbf Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last summer, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, I sat in a room full of scientists, innovators, and thought leaders. Someone asked how long everyone would like to live. To my great surprise, most people agreed that somewhere in one’s 90s was a good time to kick the bucket. Given that this was a collection of curious and optimistic people whose religion is science, I was shocked that—unlike me—more of them didn’t want to live forever.

I later found out that this reaction is actually representative of the general population: Among the attendees was fellow science writer David Ewing Duncan, who has asked this question online and at the beginning of numerous talks, collecting more than 30,000 responses. The consensus? About 85 percent of people wouldn’t want to live past 120, and more than half agreed that 80 years was about how long they’d like to live. The number of people who would like to live forever? Less than 5 percent.

Bill Gifford is in that mortal majority, despite the title of his most recent book, Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying). Aging, explained Gifford on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, “kind of sucks.”

In his book, Gifford points out that the quest to find a cure for aging has permeated our thoughts for as long as there’s been a written record. “The oldest existing great work of literature,” writes Gifford, “the nearly four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, in part chronicles a man’s quest for the elixir of eternal life.”

And, given the fact that—according to Gifford—we spend some “eleventy bajillion dollars” on anti-aging creams alone, surely we must be close to discovering the formula for age-reversal. Well not quite yet. But here are some promising lines of research that might eventually lead to a hack that works forever. Or at least for a few extra decades.

1. Follow Michael Pollan’s advice to eat real food, not too much, and mostly plants: In the 1930s, a nutritionist at Cornell named Clive McCay discovered the writings of a 16th-century diabetic who, at a time when diabetes was poorly understood, voluntarily put himself on a strict diet and within a week began to feel much better. Nearly dead in his 40s, the man experienced a complete turnaround. “Even in his eighties, he was still bounding up and down the stairs of his estate,” writes Gifford. McCay read his treatise with fascination, noting that the Italian’s secret to a long life—he ultimately lived to 98—seemed to be contained in a simple message: Don’t eat so much.

For a nutritionist like McCay, this message was intriguing to say the least. So he decided to test it—by underfeeding a group of baby rats. And sure enough, his scrawny, half-starved experimental group lived almost twice as long as the portly but satisfied control group—in some cases, up to four years. Caloric restriction, as it came to be called, has been shown to increase the life spans of mice, rats, and monkeys, and to decrease the incidence of age-related diseases.

There’s still some controversy, however, as to whether the beneficial effects of caloric restriction result from fewer calories total or just fewer “bad” calories coming from junk food. A 2012 study from the National Institutes of Aging compared groups of rhesus monkeys who were fed healthy diets—similar to what Pollan might recommend—and in this case, a 30 percent reduction in calories did not seem to have much of an effect. So some scientists have suggested that in earlier studies, the experimenters were comparing animals fed what we humans would consider junk food with those whose diets included less sugar and fat. But the NIA study is still ongoing, and there’s some new evidence that even if the monkeys ate healthy food, there still might be a benefit in showing some restraint.

So what’s going on? Are the hungry animals simply less likely to get diabetes? “When you’re not eating, your cells actually do go into a different state,” explains Gifford. “It’s like they have a different engine.” Eating less puts your body into a “conservation” mode, in which you’re not growing and metabolizing food in the same way. And—if scientists like McCay are correct—animals in this mode can live longer.

An important note of caution, though. Eating too little can of course lead to malnutrition, which has its own negative side effects and is quite common in the elderly. And restricting calories in children is particularly dangerous, as development stalls in the conservation mode.

2. Metformin: There’s actually a treatment for diabetes that also shows promise in terms of increasing our longevity. Metformin, a drug commonly prescribed to treat patients with type 2 diabetes, has been shown to extend the health span—that is, how long someone remains healthy—and the life span of male mice. “Diabetics who are on metformin actually seem to be living longer than nondiabetics who are not on it,” says Gifford, “when in fact the reverse should be true. The diabetics should be dying sooner.” It turns out that taking metformin provides some of the benefits of caloric restriction, such as improved physical performance and better cholesterol levels. In your cells, metformin increases antioxidant protection and reduces chronic inflammation, one of the mechanisms by which aging ravages our bodies.

3. Exchange your old blood for young blood: The vampires were on to something: The fountain of “youthiness,” as Gifford calls it, might be found in our circulatory system. One of the things that sucks about aging is the way in which our ability to recover from injury and fend off illness declines. Blood has long been a candidate for élan vital—or the essence of life—and even back in the 16th century, Sir Francis Bacon transfused blood from a young dog to an old one, which seemed to rejuvenate him. In the 1970s, a scientist at the University of California-Irvine cut open young rats and sewed them to old rats, a method called parabiosis, essentially combining their circulatory systems. These rats lived much longer than those who were paired with rats of the same age—four to five months longer, which, given that the average life span for a lab rat is about two years, is an enormous difference.

Even more exciting is research coming from the lab of Tony Wyss-Coray and his colleagues at Stanford University, who infused older mice with the blood of younger animals and found that the older mice were indeed rejuvenated. Their brains became more plastic and malleable—a hallmark of youth. The procedure enabled them to learn and remember information like their younger donors and helped them perform much better on tests of mouse cognition. Below, you can watch an older mouse show improvement on a maze test after being infused with young blood.

4. Train for the Senior Olympics: If someone told you that there was an absolutely free treatment that hundreds of studies had shown to be effective in combating many different age-related diseases, you probably wouldn’t believe them. But this miracle drug really does exist—in the form of exercise. “Between 50 and 70, we say goodbye to about 15 percent of our lean muscle,” says Simon Melov, a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, who is quoted in Gifford’s book. “After that, it jumps to 30 percent per decade. You could make the case that aging starts in muscle.” As we age, this muscle turns to fat. And because muscles burn more calories than fat, your metabolism—the process by which your cells turn food into fuel—slows down, leaving more sugar in your blood and making you more vulnerable to diabetes. Staving off the metabolic changes that accompany this shift from muscle to fat will help keep your body young. Many pharmaceutical companies are developing drugs to promote muscle growth, but thus far, staying active seems to be just as effective.

Part of the effect that exercise has on our metabolism has to do with how our genes are expressed. Throughout your lifetime, different genes are turned on and off depending on things like your age, your behavior, and your environment. So although you might have a genetic predisposition for smoking-related cancers, for example, you might be able to stave off the disease by not smoking. (Even if you’ve never smoked, however, it’s still possible to get lung cancer.)

Similarly, exercising seems to turn off some genes while turning on others. In a remarkable study from 2007, a bunch of Canadians were placed on a strict exercise regimen for six months. Half of them were old, and half were young. Scientists then compared biopsies of their muscles taken before and after the regimen. And they found that the older Canadians had activated many of the genes that were active in their younger counterparts but that had been inactive before they began to exercise. Exercise seemed to have switched on young genes, and switched off older ones—particularly genes that were involved in metabolism.

Think you’re already too old to start exercising? Many medal winners in the Senior Olympics start training after retiring from their jobs, like 89-year-old Dr. Granville Coggs, who ran his first race when he was 77. For some more inspiration, watch the women’s 400-meter sprint from the 76-80 age group at the 2013 Senior Olympics, complete with commentary by the friends of the competitors in this video.

5. Be small: While height might give you many advantages during your working years, it may also contribute to your early demise. The taller you are, the more likely you are to develop cancer, among other problems. Why height is a risk factor for cancer remains unclear, but it might have to do with the fact that the taller you are, the more cells you have and the higher your likelihood of developing a cancer-causing mutation in them. In fact, people who live past 100 aren’t just small because they’ve shrunk with age—they actually tend to have started out on the smaller side. Just like for dogs, whose life span negatively correlates with size—that is, the smaller the dog, the longer its life expectancy—being short has its advantages.

To listen to my full interview with Bill Gifford, stream below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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5 Ways You Can Live Forever

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The excerpt, from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and a 2015 Paula Giddings article, are from the Nation magazine’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They come to us from the TomDispatch website.

Finishing School for Pickets

By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)

One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.

The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.

Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.

“You can always tell a Spelman girl,” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The “Spelman girl” walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.

This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.” But the statement has a measure of truth.

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the “War on Terror.” (eBookNation, 2014).

Learning Insubordination

By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)

In the current age of “lean-in” feminism at one end of the spectrum and an “anti-respectability” discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn’s essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women’s liberation.

Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

These young girls were born in the 1940s, and whatever the background of their parents (who might be sharecroppers, teachers, or doctors), their generation was destined to belong to a new stratum of Americans: the “Black Bourgeoisie,” as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called it. An economic class that was literally wedged in the “middle” between a small black elite and the black masses, this group emerged in no small part because of the unprecedented number of educated women who, historically excluded from pink-collar positions, now had access not only to the elite professions, but to mainstream administrative, clerical, and civil-service jobs.

For black women, burdened by stereotypes of hypersexuality, this development meant more than a triumph of simple social mobility. With education, more girls could now escape the domestic and personal service work that subjected them to the sexual exploitation of employers and others. To be able to avoid such a soul-killing future was the dream of generations of mothers for their daughters—one that I often heard from my own grandmother, who had migrated north so that my mother could be the first in the family to attain a college education. The stakes in taking advantage of these newer opportunities were indeed high and brimmed with profound meaning and emotion.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

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This chafing ice sheet is making us really uncomfortable

by PorfiriWeldon Posted on March 11, 2015

This chafing ice sheet is making us really uncomfortable

By on 11 Mar 2015commentsShare

Friction — can’t live with it; can’t live without it. One minute the fickle force is keeping you from sliding out of your chair; the next, it’s giving you a chafing situation that’ll bring tears to your eyes. And then all of a sudden it’s deciding the fate of humanity.

Fine, that last one might be a bit of an exaggeration, but that’s kind of what it feels like after reading this new study about friction’s role in the stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet — you know, the one that could raise sea levels up to 16 feet if it collapses? Which, by the way, scientists are pretty sure that it will? The study from researchers at Caltech, published this week in the Journal of Glaciology, indicates that the imperiled ice sheet could be in an even more precarious position than we thought.

Here’s the rub (sorry): Previous models of the ice sheet assumed that, wherever the sheet made contact with the ocean floor, there was a constant amount of stress keeping it in place. This new model, on the other hand, incorporates a frictional force that varies along the base of the ice sheet as growing water pressure counteracts the weight of the ice sheet.

This frictional force brings the grounding line of the ice sheet — the area where the ice sheet touches off the ocean floor and becomes a floating ice shelf — into shallower waters than researchers had expected. It also reduces the amount of stress the ice sheet feels at the grounding line. Together, these put the entire ice sheet in a more precarious position — previous studies have shown that the way the ocean bed slopes in these shallower waters is conducive to ice loss. Andrew Thompson, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech and a coauthor on the study, said in a press release:

Our results show that the stability of the whole ice sheet and our ability to predict its future melting is extremely sensitive to what happens in a very small region right at the grounding line. It is crucial to accurately represent the physics here in numerical models.

And this isn’t just a computer model, but there’s still plenty to learn about what’s going on with this enormous slab of ice that has the power to completely change the world as we know it. Still, every time I read “extensional stress” in this paper — and the phrase comes up a lot — I accidentally read it as “existential stress.” That has to mean something.

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Friction Means Antarctic Glaciers More Sensitive to Climate Change Than We Thought – See more at: http://www.caltech.edu/news/friction-means-antarctic-glaciers-more-sensitive-climate-change-we-thought-45903#sthash.1lDBITCl.dpuf

, Caltech.

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This chafing ice sheet is making us really uncomfortable

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Scientists: No, We Can’t Fight Climate Change by Burning Trees

by AdrianneFkb Posted on February 14, 2015

Mother Jones

This article originally appeared at the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A group of 78 scientists is criticizing an Environmental Protection Agency memo they say may dramatically undermine President Barack Obama’s directive to cut planet-warming emissions.

In a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, a group that includes climate scientists, engineers, and ecologists criticizes a November 2014 EPA policy memo that discounts emissions generated by burning biomass, including plants, trees, and other wood products known as sources of biogenic carbon dioxide. Critics said they fear the memo shows how biomass might be treated under the EPA’s forthcoming Clean Power Plan, which will set the first regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The EPA is expected to finalize those regulations by summer.

The EPA memo states that using biomass as a source of power is “likely to have minimal or no net atmospheric contributions of biogenic carbon dioxide emissions” as long as the biomass is produced with “sustainable forest or agricultural practices.” It also suggests that states will be able to increase the use of biomass in power plants in order to meet the limits set in the Clean Power Plan. The biogenic energy framework was the subject of a recent article in Politico magazine, which found that the interpretation “could promote the rapid destruction of America’s carbon-storing forests.”

The group of scientists argues that not all types of biomass have the same impact on carbon emissions, and that using more biomass derived from trees will actually increase overall emissions. Treating all biomass the same could lead to cutting down older-growth trees for fuel, and older trees store more carbon. The group cites a statistic from the US Energy Information Agency estimating if woody biomass is treated as carbon-free, an additional 4 percent of electricity in the US could be generated from wood over the next 20 years. The scientists estimate that may boost the US timber harvest by 70 percent.

This would likely lead to cutting even more trees, not only in the US, but around the world, the scientists argue. Even if new trees are grown to replace them, it would take many years for the trees to store as much carbon. Further, they say, burning biomass makes power plants less efficient and increases emissions.

“Including such exemptions for broad categories of biomass fuels in a final rule would not only encourage large-scale harvesting of wood to replace coal and other fossil fuels but also place no limits on the diversion of the world’s agricultural land to energy use, requiring conversions of forests and grasslands to meet food needs,” the group’s letter says.

“They’re going to declare biomass carbon-neutral with the wave of a magic wand,” William Moomaw, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Tufts University, told The Huffington Post. “It’s not carbon-neutral. It’s a rather appalling failure to actually do the math.”

Most states except Massachusetts consider biomass to be carbon-free, said Moomaw, as does the European Union.

William Schlesinger, dean emeritus at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and one of the scientists involved in writing the letter, said the EPA memo was “disturbing” because it designates all sustainable biomass as having low carbon emissions, and does not adequately define “sustainable.”

“The EPA made a promise several years ago that it would make its decisions based on science, and the best science,” said Schlesinger. “Here, we’ve got a chance to sit down and look at what the science really says.”

A group of Massachusetts environmental groups issued a statement this week expressing concern about biomass under the Clean Power Plan.

EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia said in an email to the Huffington Post that the Clean Power Plan isn’t final, and that the framework on biogenic carbon dioxide was designed as a “policy-neutral framework for assessing biogenic CO2 emissions from stationary sources—it was not developed as technical guidance.”

“What we have said repeatedly is that the memo is a snapshot of the issues that have been raised in regards to the role of biomass in how states put together their plans to reduce their carbon pollution,” said Purchia. “But we have made no definitive statements on what the role of biomass will be. We expect certain waste products and forest derived waste products might be ok, but that doesn’t mean all forest products…To reiterate, we don’t assume cutting down forests to power power plants is carbon neutral. This would really be a case by case basis that states would need to show detailed analysis that we’d review. We’d issue additional guidance if needed.”

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Scientists: No, We Can’t Fight Climate Change by Burning Trees

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Science Says FitBit Is a Joke

by OlivaPohlman Posted on February 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Recently, bands in assorted colors began appearing on the wrists of everyone from young athletes to old lawyers. FitBits, FueldBands, and other wearable fitness trackers promised to enhance the health of the wearer by accurately monitoring every step, calorie, and sleep pattern. But, according to a new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the apps on your smartphone do the job just as well, or even better—at least in terms of measuring your steps and your calories.

“There is strong evidence that higher levels of physical activity are associated with weight loss,” says Mitesh Patel, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of medicine and health care management at the University of Pennsylvania. “For most adults that want to track their general activity, smartphones will meet their needs.”

Penn researchers compared 10 of the top-selling smartphone fitness applications and pedometers with wearable devices, tracking 14 healthy adults as they walked on the treadmill.

According to the results, the smartphones were just as accurate and consistent as wearable devices. Wearable devices had as much as a 22 percent variation in the range of step counts compared to the observed number of steps taken. There was only a 6 percent difference in the range of the step counts from smartphones in comparison to observable steps. The number of steps is important to accurately estimate the number of calories burned, which the apps and devices track by detecting the shifting position of your body.

If smartphones are just as accurate, why spend $100 or more on a fancy tracker bracelet?

“Smartphones may be harder to carry with more vigorous activity such as running or biking, and that might be one reason an individual chooses to use a wearable device,” explains Patel, pointing to an obvious objection for people who might reject smartphones as fitness trackers.

But fitness trackers still might not be the right choice for heavy exercisers. According to Live Science, a site that tracks scientific news, when fitness trackers first came out, workout enthusiasts were disappointed in the basic functions like step counters. “A lot of people stopped using fitness trackers altogether because it wasn’t telling much more then they already knew,” Wes Henderek, a market researcher at NPD Group told Live Science. JAMA also reported that only about 1 to 2 percent of adults own wearable devices, and one-third completely stop using the devices after only six months.

More than 65 percent of American adults own smartphones and generally carry them throughout the day. For those hoping to get a handle on how active they were during the day, smartphone applications that track food consumption, activity, sleep, and other health factors may be more convenient and less expensive.

“While smartphones and wearable devices can help track health behaviors, they may not alone drive behavior change,” says Patel. The key, he says, is to figure out how to engage individuals so they use technology to lead them to changing unhealthy behavior, especially those that most in need of making the change.

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Science Says FitBit Is a Joke

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50 Years Ago This Week We Started Bombing Vietnam

by NestorMathieu Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The 1960s—that extraordinary decade—is celebrating its 50th birthday one year at a time. Happy birthday, 1965! How, though, do you commemorate the Vietnam War, the era’s signature catastrophe? After all, our government prosecuted its brutal and indiscriminate war under false pretexts, long after most citizens objected, and failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. More than 58,000 Americans were killed along with more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

So what exactly do we write on the jubilee party invitation? You probably know the answer. We’ve been rehearsing it for decades. You leave out every troubling memory of the war and simply say: “Let’s honor all our military veterans for their service and sacrifice.”

For a little perspective on the 50th anniversary, consider this: we’re now as distant from the 1960s as the young Bob Dylan was from Teddy Roosevelt. For today’s typical college students, the Age of Aquarius is ancient history. Most of their parents weren’t even alive in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, initiating the daily bombing of the entire country, North and South, and an enormous buildup of more than half a million troops.

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50 Years Ago This Week We Started Bombing Vietnam

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High School Police Ask Judge to Let Them Pepper-Spray and Arrest Unruly Students

by JennaManifold Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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When B.J. ambled into his fourth-period class at PD Jackson-Olin High School in Birmingham, Alabama, he could hardly have predicted that he would soon be handcuffed and crying, with pepper spray searing his eyes and nasal passages. Nor would he have guessed that by the day’s end he would be sequestered in a holding cell, vomiting from the chemicals.

Here’s how it happened, as described in court documents: One day in September 2010, “Mr. Cook,” a substitute teacher in the Birmingham City Schools, told B.J. (his initials), then a wiry 10th-grader, that he couldn’t be in the classroom until he tucked in his shirt. The teen obliged—dress violations were known to escalate at the school—but as he slipped back into the room a few minutes later, the sub heard someone among the rows mutter, “Fuck you, Mr. Cook.” Unsure who’d dissed him, he zeroed in on B.J. and summoned “Assistant Principal Gaston.”

Out in the hallway, Gaston subjected B.J. to a forced physical search. B.J. objected, and wriggled to loosen himself from the administrator’s grip. He tripped and landed facedown on the floor—whereupon Gaston took advantage of B.J.’s vulnerable position to check his back pockets. B.J.’s defiance led Gaston to call in backup. The kid soon found himself upright and pinned to a row of lockers by Gaston and a fellow administrator, “Assistant Principal Gates.”

That’s when School Resource Officer (SRO) Marion Benson arrived on the scene. Her face was the last thing B.J. saw before she blasted him with a cloud of pepper spray. He sunk to the ground in tears. If you try getting up, I am going to spray you again, she told him, her knee digging into B.J.’s back. She handcuffed him and led him to the main office.

“Woo! That’s the first macing of the year!” Mr. Gates remarked as the shackled teen sat in the office. Twenty minutes later, still wearing his chemical-infused clothes, B.J. was taken to the hospital, where staff said it was too late to do anything about the pepper spray, and then to a nearby detention center. He was held in a cell there until 7 p.m., when his grandmother came to pick him up.

This Was One of eight stories presented to US District Judge Abdul Kallon these past few weeks in a lawsuit whose outcome, which is expected in a decision Monday, may determine whether the city cops who work within the Birmingham school district as SROs can keep using pepper spray to break up fights and thwart what they consider disorderly conduct.

The suit, filed in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleges that eight students, including B.J., suffered physically and emotionally from unnecessary use of pepper spray. It names six SROs, as well as Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper. In 2012, a judge granted the case class action status, which means the outcome will henceforth apply to all of the district’s students.

“We want it to be declared unconstitutional because it allows officers to spray people, specifically students, without considering a wide variety of factors—such as whether they are in a school environment, the fact that they are in a closed environment, and the fact that these things that they are accusing kids of doing and acting on are actually just student misconduct issues,” says Ebony Howard, the SPLC staff attorney representing the students.

Since 2006, Howard says, there have been at least 110 pepper-spray incidents in the district. At the very least, her team wants the judge to insist upon written guidelines that state explicitly the circumstances in which it would be appropriate to reach for the Freeze +P chemical agent the officers use. “We want training for these officers on adolescent development, de-escalation techniques, conflict management, and conflict resolution,” she told me. “Basically, we want them to be trained on how to actually be SROs, and to work in an environment where they have the tools to help calm down a conflict that do not involve spraying chemicals in kids’ faces.”

The modern police presence in schools emerged from the same crack-era hysteria that brought us mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and an explosion of the US prison population. During the early-to-mid-1990s, with juvenile arrests for violent crime on the rise and legislators shrilling about the so-called juvenile superpredators, more and more schools contracted with police departments to put uniformed officers on campus.

Looking back in 2013, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported that about 25 percent of existing SRO programs were originally created because of media-incited fears, and another 25 percent because of school rowdiness and vandalism. Only about 4 percent of districts and law enforcement agencies cited the level of violence in local schools as the motivation for initiating a program. (The rest of the programs were created for “other” reasons, such as a school taking advantage of grant money or taking part in a drug awareness program.)

The number of school resource officers deployed nationwide continued to surge into the early oughts. According to the CRS, there were about 12,000 SROs in 1997—by 2003, the number of officers had grown to nearly 20,000. When the Birmingham district began putting local police in its schools in 1996, it made what the authors of a Justice Department assessment would later describe as a “frequent and destructive mistake.” Like many other districts, it enlisted the cops without first working out their roles and responsibilities in a school setting. “When programs fail to do this, problems are often rampant at the beginning of the program—and often persist for months and even years,” the 2005 assessment warned.

A few years after that report appeared, the district’s then-interim superintendent Barbara Allen began to take notice of what had become an increasingly troublesome partnership. In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police were stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.

Indeed, in 2007-08, a whopping 513 students from the district landed in Jefferson County Family Court. This represented 82 percent of the referrals from schools to court in the county, even though only 25 percent of Jefferson County’s public school students attend Birmingham City Schools. Brian Huff, then a presiding judge, complained to the Birmingham News that fewer than 1 in 10 of those kids ever should have been arrested.

Allen knew she had a real problem on her hands when she learned that multiple school officials were heading to court at least once a week. “Other school systems aren’t arresting kids for small things; they handle it from within,” she told the Birmingham News in the spring of 2009. “We call the police.” The district’s high schools had a total of 12 SROs, plus two sergeants and a lieutenant, patrolling their hallways and grounds. (The same Birmingham News article quoted Mayor Larry Langford saying he would “pull officers off the streets and put them in the schools,” after the mayor had encountered graffiti and disrespectful students during a high school visit.)

After meeting with Judge Huff that summer to discuss the problem, Allen took action. That December, she persuaded the Birmingham PD to sign a “collaborative agreement,” which fleshed out, somewhat, the role of police in the schools. Notably, it acknowledged that pepper spray and cuffs were being used for minor offenses, and that teachers and administrators should be the ones addressing noncriminal violations in the future.

But the agreement had fatal flaws: For one, it didn’t detail how officers should act when their intervention was deemed necessary, so officers continued to behave in schools as they would on the streets. The document also had an “exceptional circumstances” clause, which gave police employees the right to exercise their discretion. The defense in the SPLC lawsuit is now pointing to this provision to argue that the officers have the green light to arrest and deal with students as they see fit.

IF POLICE OFFICERS happened upon a couple of 16-year-olds fighting off campus, they would be allowed to use pepper spray, so why would it be any different on a school campus? That’s a question posed by Michael Choy, the police department’s defense attorney, during the second week of the trial.

The court, Choy said, must remember that these students “are not children” but, rather, “big adults.” One of the former students in the case, he emphasized, would be testifying by video from a New York prison. The implicit message: These kids were the bad apples.

Choy’s comment was “very disturbing,” says Dennis Parker, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program. It reminds him of how police in Ferguson, Missouri, tried to portray Michael Brown as a hoodlum after one of their own shot the unarmed teenager. The tactic distracts from the question at hand, which is “whether or not the police or the SRO were acting in an appropriate way.”

The criminalization of minor student misconduct, and the effect it has on high school kids, is a topic Thomas Pedroni, an associate professor at Wayne State University’s College of Education, is studying in partnership with the ACLU. “Police set up a different environment in a school,” he explains. “It becomes less focused on nurturing and caring and growing, and more focused on control…It’s sort of tough in the environment of police presence to go, ‘Oh, no, we’re really a community of trust.'”

In many ways, Pedroni adds, the school-to-prison pipeline could be renamed the prison-to-prison pipeline, given how so many schools have adopted the sterile, suspicion-first qualities of juvenile detention centers.

This notion of a dehumanized high school experience played a central role in Howard’s legal strategy, especially as she aimed to convey the ripple of effects of a zero-tolerance school culture.

“When you use a tactic like chemical sprays in schools, what you do is you teach a kid who has been sprayed, a kid who may have been accidentally sprayed, a kid who saw another kid get sprayed, as well as a kid who just knows about the use of the chemical—all of those kids learn to distrust law enforcement officers,” Howard says. “They learn that they will not be treated fairly.”

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High School Police Ask Judge to Let Them Pepper-Spray and Arrest Unruly Students

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The FBI Just Arrested an Alleged Russian Spy Who Wanted to Know How to Trigger an Economic Meltdown

by Opal04Epbqih Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday, federal prosecutors in New York filed a complaint accusing three men, Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobnyy, of spying for Russia. Buryakov, who was arrested in the Bronx on Monday, allegedly posed as a Russian bank official while working for Russia’s intelligence service, the SVR. According to the 26-page complaint, which was unsealed Monday, Buryakov had a good reason to choose that cover: He was interested in learning about high-speed Wall Street trading, automated trading algorithms, and “destabilization of markets.”

This is a real threat. As I reported in 2013, markets have become dramatically faster in the years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Automated trading algorithms can buy and sell financial products in less time than it takes you to blink. Markets move way too fast for regulators to monitor. On August 1, 2012, rogue computer code at Knight Capital ran for 45 minutes before anyone at the firm could stop it. By the end of the day, the company was insolvent. And that was just “a canary in the mine,” says Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor and former regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The big worry is trading algorithms causing “a series of cascade failures,” warns Bill Black, another former regulator. “If enough of these bad things occur at the same time, financial institutions can begin to fail, even very large ones.”

So is it possible Russian spies are trying to find out how to purposefully unleash this chaos? The complaint doesn’t make clear whether the alleged spies were trying to find out how to destabilize US markets or worried about Russian markets being destabilized. But “fears of algorithmic terrorism, where a well-funded criminal or terrorist organization could find a way to cause a major market crisis, are not unfounded,” John Bates, a computer scientist who, in the early 2000s, designed software behind complicated trading algorithms, wrote in 2011. “This type of scenario could cause chaos for civilization and profit for the bad guys and must constitute a matter of national security.”

According to the complaint, the FBI learned of the alleged spies’ interest in market destabilization by eavesdropping on a May 2013 phone call between Buryakov and Sporyshev, a Russian trade representative. Sporyshev was the person “responsible for relaying assignments from Moscow Center to Buryakov,” according to the complaint; Podobnyy was mostly responsible for “analyzing and reporting back to Moscow Center about the fruits of Buryakov’s intelligence-gathering efforts.” (Sporyshev and Podobnyy, who were protected by diplomatic immunity, were not arrested and have left the country.) Buryakov and Sporyshev usually met in person, but on that day they didn’t have time. On the phone, Sporyshev asked Buryakov what questions an unnamed Russian news organization should ask New York Stock Exchange executives that would be useful to Russian intelligence, according to the complaint. Buryakov allegedly suggested the news organization inquire about high-frequency and automated trading systems.

According to the complaint, Buryakov was especially interested in Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), which are baskets of financial products that are combined and bought and sold like stocks. Many Americans might assume the Russians were interested in destabilizing American markets, but “it might be the other way around, where they are concerned with us attacking them,” says Eric Hunsader, who runs Nanex, a market data firm that tracks high-speed trading. On April 23, 2014, Hunsader’s company tracked extremely unusual movement in trades of RSX, RUSL, and RUSS—three ETFs that are based on the Russian stock index. “It was something that was definitely manipulated,” Hunsader says. “You don’t generally see that kind of movement go on…Maybe they’re concerned about us screwing with them.”

But here’s another fear: If foreign intelligence services are looking into algorithms, high-speed trading, and destabilizing financial markets, nonstate actors are probably not that far behind.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from the complaint:

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Read the rest of the complaint against the alleged Russian spies here.

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The FBI Just Arrested an Alleged Russian Spy Who Wanted to Know How to Trigger an Economic Meltdown

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Friday Cat Blogging – 23 January 2015

by UTQAlexand Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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I wrote this morning’s short post and then spent the rest of the morning napping. This is ridiculous, and I don’t know what’s going on. I’m a thousand percent better than I was Tuesday and Wednesday, but still dog tired. One possibility is that this is due to a change in my chemo schedule. Instead of getting all three meds on Friday, I got two of them on Friday and then the third as a standalone on Monday. The next day I was wiped out. Anyway, I hope that’s the reason, since this was a one-time thing. I’ll ask about it today, though I have little hope of getting any satisfactory answers.

In any case, it’s finally Friday, so how about some catblogging? This week features a brand new addition to the extended family of Drum cats. My friend Professor Marc sends along this photo of Ivan Davidoff, his new Siberian. His report: “Seems to like being around people, but is not a cuddle-kitty. He likes being petted, will frequently come see if I’m still in the home office if I’m working there, sometimes jumps onto the desk to be next to me, but is not a lap cat. Maybe that will come as he gets more comfortable. Has woken us up in the middle of the night to get affection, but is not pushy about it.” He is certainly a handsome critter, no?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 23 January 2015

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