Tag Archives: Real

Fired Scott Walker Aide Is Tweeting Up a Shitstorm About What He Did Wrong

by anunturigratuiteonlinebucuresti Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will announce at 6 p.m. Monday that he is dropping out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The move is surprising—Walker was, until recently, a favorite among major Republican donors—but not unforeseeable. In the past two months, Walker’s support in the Iowa caucuses, the first voting contest of the race, has plummeted, from first in the polls to seventh. His campaign has already racked up six figures in debt to campaign vendors. And he clocked the least amount of time out of the 11 Republicans who shared the stage in the latest GOP presidential debate.

Immediately after the announcement, Liz Mair, a digital strategist for Walker’s bid who was fired for tweeting negatively about Iowa, began spouting her thoughts about why Walker’s campaign failed to attract enough money and momentum to keep it afloat. For example, “Hiring people who spent a lot to build out a massive operation that would not be sustainable unless financing remained amazing forever.” Here’s a selection:

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Fired Scott Walker Aide Is Tweeting Up a Shitstorm About What He Did Wrong

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The Real Lesson From Emailgate: Maybe the State Department Needs More Secure Email

by CassieRZJyu Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Ignatius talked with “a half-dozen knowledgeable lawyers” and concluded that the Hillary Clinton email affair has been overblown. No big surprise there. Click the link if you want more.

But here’s the curious part. Part of Clinton’s trouble stems from the fact that sensitive information was sent to her via email, which isn’t meant for confidential communications. However, as Ignatius points out, this is a nothingburger. Everyone does this, and has for a long time. But why?

“It’s common knowledge that the classified communications system is impossible and isn’t used,” said one former high-level Justice Department official. Several former prosecutors said flatly that such sloppy, unauthorized practices, although technically violations of law, wouldn’t normally lead to criminal cases.

Why is the classified system so cumbersome? Highly secure encryption is easy to implement on off-the-shelf PCs, and surely some kind of software that plugs into email and restricts the flow of messages wouldn’t be too hard to implement. So why not build more security into email and ditch the old system? What’s the hold-up?

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The Real Lesson From Emailgate: Maybe the State Department Needs More Secure Email

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Trump: "This Isn’t a Gun Problem, This Is a Mental Problem."

by ThanhTorrence Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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A day after two journalists in Virginia were fatally shot on live television, Donald Trump is rejecting calls to strengthen gun control laws. Instead, he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo today that mental health issues are to blame for gun violence in America. This isn’t a gun problem, this is a mental problem,” the presidential hopeful said.

“You’re not going to get rid of all guns,” Trump added. “I know one thing: If you try to do it, the bad guys would have them. And the good folks would abide by the laws but be hopeless.” The real state mogul defended the Second Amendment, which he said he was “very much into.”

Trump’s opposition to stricter gun legislation in favor of focusing on mental health problems is not new. But many experts argue such thinking is flawed. “Consider that between 2001 and 2010, there were nearly 120,000 gun-related homicides…Few were perpetrated by people with mental illness,” psychiatry professor Richard A. Friedman wrote in the New York Times after the Newtown shooting in 2012.

Trump is just one of the 2016 candidates to weigh in following the murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward on Wednesday morning. Speaking at a press conference in Iowa, Hillary Clinton told reporters that she was “stricken” by the shooting. “We have got to do something about gun violence in America,” Clinton said. “And I will take it on.”

Speaking to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night, the father of one of the victims vowed to fight for increased gun control measures. “Whatever it takes to get gun legislation, to shame people, to shame legislators into doing something about closing loopholes and background checks and making sure crazy people don’t get guns,” Andy Parker said.

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Trump: "This Isn’t a Gun Problem, This Is a Mental Problem."

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Saul Bellow Was 30 Years Ahead of Me

by BillBarrios7348 Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s a fascinating little August tidbit, via Jeet Heer on Twitter. It’s an excerpt from The Dean’s December, by Saul Bellow, published in 1981. Albert Corde, an academic, is talking to a scientist (obviously modeled on the seminal lead researcher Clair Patterson) about the “real explanation of what goes on in the slums”:

“And the explanation? What is the real explanation?”

“Millions of tons of intractable lead residues poisoning the children of the poor. They’re the most exposed….Crime and social disorganization in inner city populations can all be traced to the effects of lead. It comes down to the nerves, to brain damage.”

….Direct material causes? Of course. Who could deny them? But what was odd was that no other causes were conceived of. “So it’s lead, nothing but old lead?” he said.

“I would ask you to study the evidence.”

And that was what Corde now began to do, reading through stapled documents, examining graphs….What was the message?….A truly accurate method of detecting tiny amounts of lead led to the discovery that the cycle of lead in the earth had been strongly perturbed. The conclusion: Chronic lead insult now affects all mankind….Mental disturbances resulting from lead poison are reflected in terrorism, barbarism, crime, cultural degradation.

….Tetraethyl fumes alone could do it—engine exhaust—and infants eating flaking lead paint in the slums became criminal morons.

What’s interesting is the mention of crime. Lead was a well-known neurotoxin by 1981, strongly implicated in educational problems and loss of IQ. So it’s no big surprise that it might pop up as a prop in a novel. But nobody was yet linking it to the rise of violent crime. That would wait for another 20 years. And a truly credible case for the link between lead and crime wouldn’t appear for yet another decade, when the necessary data became available and technology had advanced enough to produce convincing brain studies. Neither of those was available in the 1980s.

Nonetheless, the germ of the idea was there. In a way, that’s not surprising: I’ve always felt that, given what we know about what lead does to the childhood brain, its link to violent crime should never have been hard to accept. It would actually be surprising if childhood lead exposure didn’t have an effect on violent crime.

Anyway, that’s it. Your literary connection of the day to one of my favorite topics.

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Saul Bellow Was 30 Years Ahead of Me

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We May Have Bill Clinton to Thank for Donald Trump’s Presidential Run

by ChaseLeventhal Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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As Americans eagerly await the circus that will be tomorrow’s first Republican presidential debate—almost entirely generated by the presence of front-runner Donald Trump—a new report offers a surprising connection that led the real estate mogul to throw his hat in the ring: Bill Clinton.

The Washington Post reports Clinton and Trump had a private phone call shortly before the GOP’s newest star officially announced his candidacy. During the call, the former president—and spouse of the likely democratic nominee—stopped short of outright pushing him to run for president. Instead, Clinton reportedly prodded Trump to seek a “larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.”

Clearly flattered by the words of his favorite president ever, Trump got the hint, entered the race. The rest is viral history. Clinton’s office confirmed the phone call.

Despite the recent exchange over Trump’s controversial “rapist” characterization of Mexican immigrants—Hillary said she was “very disappointed” by the comments; Trump fired back, calling her the “worst Secretary of State” in history—the new report highlights the unusual friendship shared between the Clintons and Trump.

Back in 2012, Clinton noted that Trump has been “uncommonly nice” to him and Hillary. “We’re all New Yorkers,” Clinton said. “I like him. And I love playing golf with him.”

With that kind of praise, Clinton has clearly been playing the long game.

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We May Have Bill Clinton to Thank for Donald Trump’s Presidential Run

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California Really Doesn’t Need to Worry About Losing Jobs to Texas

by VirginiHoltze Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Is California losing jobs to Texas, thanks to California’s stringent anti-business regulations vs. Texas’s wide-open business-friendly environment? It’s a question I have only a modest interest in, since there are lots of reasons for states to gain or lose business. California has nice weather. Texas has cheap housing. Recessions hit different states at different times and with different intensities. Business regulations might be part of the mix, but it’s all but impossible to say how much.

But now I care even less. Lyman Stone ran some numbers and confirmed that, in fact, California has been losing jobs and Texas has been gaining jobs over the past couple of decades. But by itself that isn’t very interesting. The real question is, how many jobs? Here is Stone’s chart:

Stone comments: “Net migration isn’t 1% or 2%. It’s plus or minus 0.05% in most cases. Even as a share of total change in employment, migration is massively overwhelmed by employment changes due to local startups and closures, and local expansions and contractions. The truth is, net employment changes due to firm migration are within the rounding error of total employment. Over time they may matter, but overall they’re pretty miniscule.”

What’s more, these numbers are for migration to and from every state in the union. They’re far smaller if you look solely at California-Texas migration.

Bottom line: An almost invisible number of workers are migrating from California to Texas each year, probably less than .02 percent. The share of that due to business regulation is even less, probably no more than .01 percent. That’s so small it belongs in the “Other” category of any employment analysis. No matter how you look at it, this is just not a big deal.

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California Really Doesn’t Need to Worry About Losing Jobs to Texas

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Want to Meet a 9/11 Truther? Go to a Donald Trump Event

by MosesSerena Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Despite all the outrageous stunts and patently racist quotes from Donald Trump’s current campaign for president, the real estate mogul continues to lead as the front-runner for the GOP nomination.

The Washington Post‘s David Weigel recently visited a Trump “family picnic” to take a look at the pandemonium surrounding the campaign. It’s also where 9/11 Truth Activist Rick Shaddock happened to be before meandering into the press room to ask the following question:

Trump rejected the question, asking the reporters in the room, “Is this guy some kind of conspiracy guy?” But he shouldn’t have been all too surprised by Shaddock’s presence. After all, if you’re going to peddle outrageous conspiracy theories, you’re going to attract outrageous conspiracy theorists.

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Want to Meet a 9/11 Truther? Go to a Donald Trump Event

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 July 2015

by Fidelia13O Posted on July 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hopper and Hilbert like to (a) play-wrestle with each other, and (b) jump up on the fireplace mantel. Here they are doing both. Hopper has lately been taking control of these affairs, finally realizing that she’s the real alpha cat in the household even if her brother is bigger. As she’s finally figured out, being alpha is more about will and energy than about size, and she’s got both. Nonetheless, you can see in this picture about how seriously she takes it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 July 2015

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Our Kids Are Fat, But They Don’t Know It

by DexterLenk Posted on July 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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More kids are overweight today than in the past, but fewer of them realize it:

A team of researchers at Georgia Southern University found an alarming rise in the lack of self awareness among children and teenagers in the United States. Specifically, way more overweight adolescents are oblivious today to the fact that they ought to lose weight than were in decades past—and it’s a big problem.

….Adolescents, for instance, are 29 percent less likely to correctly perceive themselves as being overweight than they were almost twenty years ago, according to the study’s findings. And the drop-off is the most pronounced among younger children—overweight 12-year-olds are almost 40 percent less likely to understand that they are overweight today.

….Solving the problem isn’t as simple as telling people that they’re overweight. There’s too fine a line between promoting health and facilitating body image issues for that to be the case….”We must be very careful when we, as parents, teachers, or health care professionals, make an effort to correct the misperception among teens,” said Zhang. “It has to be a pro-health, not anti-obesity, campaign.”

This is the place where I always start to get a little uncertain about the whole fat shaming thing. I take it for granted that overweight people should be treated with normal amounts of respect and shouldn’t be harassed about their weight. At the same time, obesity really is bad for you: it’s associated with diabetes, joint deterioration, and depression. As a society, we should try to promote healthy weight, but as individuals we should cool it with the fat jokes. This is a difficult combination to pull off.

And it’s even more important with kids, since childhood obesity is strongly associated with adult obesity. Unfortunately, it’s also harder with kids, since they have less knowledge, less self-control, and less concern with problems in the far future. How do you get them to take healthy weight seriously, but in a way that no one can complain is akin to fat shaming?

Obviously parents have to take a big role in this: if they don’t take healthy eating seriously, neither will their kids. Beyond that, I’m not sure. Ideas?

UPDATE: Aaron Carroll coincidentally reminds us today that not all obesity is created equal. Being mildly overweight has very few health implications. It’s only being seriously overweight that’s truly a problem:

Costs are NOT equally spread over obese individuals. People with class 1 obesity, or those whose BMI is greater than 30 but less than 35, pretty much have no elevated health care costs….The paper further reports that a person who has a starting BMI of 40, and can lose 5% of their weight, might expect to see reductions in health care costs of $2137. But only about 6% of adults have a BMI that high. Losing 5% of weight if you have a starting BMI of 35 would save you $528. Losing that weight if you’re starting with a BMI of 30 would save you $69.

Obviously, being moderately overweight can eventually lead to serious obesity, so it’s not something we should just ignore. Still, it’s true that the vast majority of those we call obese are only modestly overweight and don’t really have any serious health issues because of it. The real goal here is preventing mild overweight from turning into serious obesity.

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Our Kids Are Fat, But They Don’t Know It

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12-Year-Old Twin Leaders of Burma’s "God’s Army" Inspired Twin Graphic Novelists

by MichellFincham Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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The fictionalized Htoo twins. Tomer and Asaf Hanuka

The Divine, the beautifully rendered new graphic novel from Israeli artist twins Tomer and Asaf Hanuka—creators of the comic book series Bipolar—and writer Boaz Lavie, was born of a photo.

In 2000, AP photographer Apichart Weerawong snapped an iconic shot of Johnny and Luther Htoo, 12-year-old twins who smoked cheroot cigars and led “God’s Army,” a Karen rebel faction, against Burma’s junta. Land mines, lore had it, unearthed themselves at the twins’ approach, and their soldiers were impervious to bullets.

Transfixed, the artists adapted the boys as protagonists. Their Avatar-esque story follows a pair of US mercenaries on a mission to destroy a mountaintop in fictional “Quanlom,” where they encounter a kid wolfpack aided by a dragon spirit. The real Htoo twins are grown-ups now, but “for us,” the authors write, “they will always be 12-year-olds in a photo we’ll never quite understand.”

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12-Year-Old Twin Leaders of Burma’s "God’s Army" Inspired Twin Graphic Novelists

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