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900 Arguments That Will Decide the Fate of the World

by SergioHauser Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The Paris climate talks are not really happening in Paris. By train, the commune of Le Bourget is about 45 minutes from the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, or a stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens. (It is, after all, unseasonably warm.) That train passes beneath two beltways to get to the the outer ring of Parisian suburbs.

At Le Bourget station, green-vested volunteers smile and direct new arrivals to a herd of free shuttles in the ad hoc bus corral. Sunday morning, downtown Le Bourget is semi-busy and quasi-shuttered. The commune’s main avenue has a notable number of pizza shops, and quartets of cops huddle together like Doo Wop groups on every other corner. After about 10 minutes, the shuttle arrives at Paris-Le Bourget, France’s oldest commercial airport and temporary home of the so-called Paris climate talks.

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900 Arguments That Will Decide the Fate of the World

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Like a Zombie, You Just Can’t Kill Countrywide Financial

by Dee24Gylizjqka Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back at the height of the housing bubble, Countrywide Financial was responsible for about 15 percent of all the mortgage loans in America. This turned out to be disastrous because the people who ran Countrywide showed no interest at all in the quality of the loans they originated. Thanks to this, their business eventually imploded and in 2008 they were acquired by Bank of America.

But fear not. The executives behind Countrywide are still around, and they’re still shoveling out the loans:

PennyMac, AmeriHome Mortgage and Stearns Lending have several things in common.

All are among the nation’s largest mortgage lenders — and none of them is a bank. They’re part of a growing class of alternative lenders that now extend more than 4 in 10 home loans.

All are headquartered in Southern California, the epicenter of the last decade’s subprime lending industry. And all are run by former executives of Countrywide Financial, the once-giant mortgage lender that made tens of billions of dollars in risky loans that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

This time, the executives say, will be different.

You betcha! I’m sure these folks have all learned their lessons and will never push the mortgage envelope again. We can all breathe easy.

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Like a Zombie, You Just Can’t Kill Countrywide Financial

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These Tweets About Attacks on Abortion Providers Should Make Your Blood Boil

by Latesha15D Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, three people were killed and at least nine were injured when Robert Lewis Dear allegedly shot them at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility. This assault was the latest in a recent surge of violence against women’s health clinics following the release of doctored videos this summer by anti-abortion activists who claim the videos show Planned Parenthood staffers selling fetal tissue.

But even before this summer, US abortion providers have weathered a long and deadly string of violent attacks. On Sunday, Michelle Kinsey Bruns, a feminist organizer and the woman behind Twitter account @ClinicEscort, tweeted a roundup of 100 attacks on women’s health providers, beginning with the 1976 arson attempt at an abortion clinic in Eugene, Oregon, and ending with the response from some anti-abortion activists to Friday’s shooting in Colorado.

Here’s her list:

View the story “#is100enough: how many antichoice attacks, threats & incitements until you admit clinic violence is real?” on Storify

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These Tweets About Attacks on Abortion Providers Should Make Your Blood Boil

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The Paris Attacks Had Zero Impact on the Republican Race

by NicholasHoff84 Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s the most recent Pollster aggregate of the GOP primary contest. Donald Trump’s scheme to prove that Republican voters are the most gullible people on the planet continues apace. (Seriously folks: you all have blowhards in your life, don’t you? You know what they’re like, and you wouldn’t trust one of them to be dogcatcher, let alone president. Surely you recognize Trump as one of the same breed?)

But enough of that. The reason I’m putting up the latest standings is this: despite the maunderings of various pundits, it looks like the Paris attacks had exactly zero impact on the race. All five of the leading candidates were on a trajectory before the attacks, and they continued that trajectory very precisely afterward. There’s not so much as a blip in the polling data.

Debates seem to have an effect on Trump and Carson. Nothing much seems to have had an effect on the others. They’ve been on cruise control for the past month. But the Paris attacks? Whatever you felt about the candidates before, apparently they made you feel exactly the same way afterward, except more.

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The Paris Attacks Had Zero Impact on the Republican Race

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Would You Like Fewer Fries With That?

by RigoberZWR Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Aaron Carroll writes today that calorie labeling in restaurants doesn’t seem to have any effect. I skimmed through his review of the evidence in order to get to the part of the story where he tells us what does have an effect, but I was disappointed. Not surprised, though. Hardly anything works. Here’s his single paragraph about alternatives:

Previous work in Health Affairs showed that training servers to ask if customers might like to downsize three starchy sides induced up to a third of customers to order and eat 200 fewer calories per meal. More recent work in the journal showed that changing the “prevalence, prominence and default nature of healthy options” on children’s menus led to sustained changes in what people ordered.

I don’t know about children’s menus, but that first suggestion rings a bell. One of my favorite restaurants offers two sides with dinner entrees. I always order the same thing, and all I want is a single side order of fries. This is all but impossible to get. If I tell my server I want just one order of fries and nothing else, I’m told brightly that it’s no trouble to just double up the fries. If I say I don’t want two orders of fries, the cook gives them to me anyway. I think they want to fill up the plate and make sure I don’t feel ripped off.

Suggesting that we downsize calorie-laden sides might be a good idea. But in my experience, the first step is for restaurants to allow sides to be downsized if the customer asks. Baby steps.

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Would You Like Fewer Fries With That?

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Ben Carson: Medical Fraud is Bad, Unless One of My Friends Does It

by AugustuDow Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson really, really hates medical fraud. Seriously: “There would be some very stiff penalties for this kind of fraud,” he wrote a few years ago, “such as loss of one’s medical license for life, no less than ten years in prison, and loss of all of one’s personal possessions.”

Unless, that is, the fraudster happens to be Carson’s best and oldest friend. In that case, you write a letter to the judge saying, “there is no one on this planet that I trust more than Al Costa.” And it worked. Costa was a dentist who pleaded guilty to billing insurance companies for procedures he didn’t perform, but in the end the judge sentenced him only to a year of house arrest in his 8,300-square-foot mansion.

AP has the story here. But if you want some serious details about this whole case, Russ Choma has them right here at MoJo. Carson, needless to say, insists that Costa was innocent all along and was railroaded by the justice system. That’s how things work in Carsonworld. There’s the good guys and the bad guys, and Carson knows in his heart exactly who they are. As for facts, I guess they’re just chaff thrown out by secular progressives to destroy good Christians.

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Ben Carson: Medical Fraud is Bad, Unless One of My Friends Does It

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Ben Carson’s Psychology Test Story Gets Even Weirder

by DeeDidomenico47 Posted on November 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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More Ben Carson news today! You remember Doc Carson’s story about the psychology test hoax that proved he was the most honest man at Yale? Well, Carson says it really happened, and the proof is on the right. It’s a piece from the Yale Daily News about a parody issue of the News published by the Yale Record. Apparently the parody issue announced that some psychology exams had been destroyed and a retest would be held in the evening. Hilarious!

This makes the whole story even more fascinating. It’s clear that Carson’s account is substantially different from the parody. He says the class was Perceptions 301. He says 150 students showed up. He says everyone eventually walked out. He says the professor showed up at the beginning, and then again at the end. He says the professor gave him ten dollars. None of that seems to have happened.

And yet—it certainly seems likely that this is where Carson got the idea for his story. He remembered the hoax, and then embellished it considerably to turn it into a testimony to the power of God. This even makes sense. It seemed like a strange story for Carson to invent, and it turns out he didn’t. He took a story he recalled from his Yale days and then added a bunch of bells and whistles to make it into a proper testimonial.

I have a feeling that posting this news clip won’t do Carson any favors. Before, he could just insist that it happened and call the media a bunch of liars. Now, he has to defend the obvious differences between the actual hoax and what he wrote in his book. That’s not likely to turn out well. His supporters will believe him utterly (just take a look at the comments to his Facebook post), but no one else will.

Then again, maybe all this stuff did happen. Maybe the hoaxsters got the professor to cooperate. Maybe 150 students showed up, not just “several.” Maybe a fake photographer really took his picture. Maybe the professor gave him ten dollars. The kids who printed the parody issue are probably all still alive and should be able to clear this up. Let’s go ask them.

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Ben Carson’s Psychology Test Story Gets Even Weirder

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These Charts Show the Cost Of Renting a 2-Bedroom Apartment In the 5 Most-Expensive Cities In America

by FernElledge Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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A little more than a year ago, my former colleague Erika Eichelberger wrote about the fact that, for many, the rent is simply too damn high (I chipped in with some pretty charts illustrating an ugly problem). This story has been told time and time again, but a recent report from Bloomberg takes it one step further, at least for those of us lucky (or unlucky) enough to be entering the job market while living in San Francisco or New York City.

“The Starter Apartment Is Nearly Extinct in San Francisco and New York,” according the the article’s headline. Citing data compiled by real estate listings site Trulia, Bloomberg points out some depressing statistics: In San Francisco, 91 percent of one-bedroom apartments rent for more than $2,000 per month. It’s almost as bad in Manhattan, where 89 percent of one-bedroom apartments will set you back $2,000 month.

Trying to find a two bedroom? In San Francisco, almost every two-bedroom apartment rents for more than $2,000 (98 percent). Many are more than $2,500 (96 percent), or $3,000 (91 percent). More than half the two-bedrooms in San Francisco will put you back $4,000 per month. Take a look:

Trulia.com

Obviously this applies to certain parts of these cities and, indeed, if you read through Trulia’s report, it breaks the data down by neighborhood. For instance, take a look at the interactive map of San Francisco below, which breaks down the cost of 1-bedroom units:

Here’s one for New York City:

So yes, chances are you can still find something, somewhere. But the point is that for many of us, that dream of life in the big city—for a reasonable amount of money and in a convenient location—is just that: a dream.

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These Charts Show the Cost Of Renting a 2-Bedroom Apartment In the 5 Most-Expensive Cities In America

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Who Is Ben Carson’s Mystery Physicist?

by Marya7iog Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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By now, we all know that Ben Carson thinks the pyramids were built by Joseph as grain silos. I’m sort of curious about where this idea came from, and maybe eventually we’ll find out. In the meantime, I’d like to highlight a different part of Carson’s pyramid speech:

“I recently had a discussion with a well-known physicist. He was talking about the Big Bang Theory and how all this obviously culminated into this wonderful, extraordinarily organized solar system that we now have, which you can set your watch by, where scientists can predict 70 years away when a comet is coming. That’s an incredible amount of organization to have originated from just a large explosion.”

Carson then tells the story of how he supposedly stumped the physicist by asking him how he could reconcile such an “organized” universe with the laws of thermodynamics, specifically entropy, which says that systems tend to move towards disorder.

“Well of course he has no answer for that. They never have an answer for any of these things.”

Huh. Not just a physicist, a “well-known” physicist. And Carson says this guy was floored by his question. Apparently he had never given any thought to whether the Big Bang theory was compatible with the second law of thermodynamics.

Conclusion: either this was the stupidest physicist ever, or else Carson was lying. I think you can guess which side I’m on, but Carson can clear this up in a trice by telling us who this hapless physicist was. I sure hope it’s not someone who’s conveniently dead.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s probably worth noting that conservative Christians are just generally a little gaga over the second law of thermodynamics, which they’re convinced disproves the theory of evolution. You can yell “In a closed system!” until you’re blue in the face, and it makes no difference. They’ve stumped you! There are dozens of more sophisticated versions of this argument, too. Carson is just extending this chestnut a little further back in time.

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Who Is Ben Carson’s Mystery Physicist?

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Stephen Colbert Calls Out Donald Trump’s "Small" Million Dollar Loan with the Perfect Challenge

by Danae37X675619 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is not a self-made billionaire.

But speaking before ordinary Americans on Monday, the real-estate mogul attempted to recast his widely known cushy beginnings by telling the story of a meager one million dollar loan provided by his old man, Fred Trump.

“It has not been easy for me,” he insisted.

On Wednesday, Stephen Colbert took Trump’s humble roots to task by daring him to pay it forward to the kids at Harlem’s Children Zone, a charity organization that helps disadvantaged youth in New York.

“Who knows, the kids you help might one day be so rich that they can blow their cash on a presidential campaign,” the Late Show host said.

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Stephen Colbert Calls Out Donald Trump’s "Small" Million Dollar Loan with the Perfect Challenge

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