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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

by mr2ql Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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For some reason, the New York Times Magazine decided to poll its readers to see if they’d be willing to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby. Only 42 percent said yes.

WTF? I assume there are no time travel paradoxes involved here, nor any baroque inventions about how the world actually ends up worse without World War II. Science fiction nerds like me (and lots of you, I assume) love to natter on about stuff like this, but it really doesn’t seem like the NYTM’s thing. Basically, you get transported back to Hitler’s crib in 1889, you shoot him, and a few seconds later you return home. End of story. Would you do it?

I’m not an especially bloodthirsty guy, but hell yes, I’d do it. Sure, maybe World War II would happen anyway, though that’s hardly inevitable. Maybe the Holocaust too. But even a reasonable chance of stopping either one of them would be well worth the life of a baby who would otherwise grow up to be a monster. What am I missing here? I wouldn’t even hesitate.

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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

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Bernie Sanders Wants the DOJ to Investigate Exxon

by Phillip9950 Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday joined a push for the Department of Justice to investigate allegations that ExxonMobil hid research confirming fossil fuels contribute significantly to climate change.

In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Sanders accused the oil giant of a “potential instance of corporate fraud,” which he added could “ultimately qualify as a violation of federal law.”

“Exxon Mobil knew the truth about fossil fuels and climate change and lied to protect their business model at the expense of the planet,” Sanders, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, wrote.

Last week, two House Democrats sent Lynch a very similar letter, pressing her to launch an investigation into Exxon’s actions. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, another Democratic presidential candidate, has also indicated support for an official inquiry

The requests come after in-depth reports by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News revealed that decades of research conducted by senior Exxon scientists warned burning fossil fuels could lead to increasing global temperatures.

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Bernie Sanders Wants the DOJ to Investigate Exxon

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

by RandallEZML Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is some video, they are dangerous and venomous, don’t get close to them. Rescued this sea snake today on the beach here at Silverstrand in Oxnard. Prior to this there was only a report of them being seen as far north as Orange County. El Niño has definitely brought a lot of strange and unusual aquatic fish and animals up. Caution these snakes are venomous and should be avoided and not handled. And yes it is alive.

Posted by

Robert Forbes on Friday, October 16, 2015

On Friday, Southern Californians began freaking out after a surfer discovered a venomous sea snake on a beach north of Los Angeles. The species, the yellow-bellied sea snake, normally keeps to tropical waters and has not been reported on the Golden State’s shores for more than 30 years, and never as far north as Ventura County. The snake died shortly after it was found, but not before adding to El Niño apocalypse anxiety. Local wildlife experts have hypothesized that the snake traveled this far north because of unusually warm waters off of the California coast due to El Niño.

If you suffer from ophidiophobia, these reports probably gave you a scare. But we have some good news: While venomous snakes are a significant danger in other parts of the world, the United States is almost certainly not going to see a wave of deadly snake attacks, even with a strong El Niño. Yes, sea snakes might be feeding further north this winter, but that does not mean they are going to be out for human prey; likely the only reason this snake came ashore is because it was injured or sick.

Furthermore, according to David Steen, a snake expert and researcher at Auburn University’s Museum of Natural History, there are no known human deaths attributed to the yellow-bellied sea snake, and only about five people per year are killed by venomous snakes of any kind in the United States. By contrast, there were 42 reports of dog-bite fatalities in the United States last year.

“Venomous snakes deserve our respect but in many cases the danger they represent is exaggerated,” Steen wrote me in an email, adding that a sea snake would have no reason to attack a human unless it was picked up or harassed. “If you don’t already know that it is a bad idea to pick up snakes that you do not recognize then you probably have bigger problems.”

This story has been revised.

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

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You play a fungus in this video game, because the apocalypse happened and almost everything is dead

by RheaPawsey1248 Posted on October 16, 2015

You play a fungus in this video game, because the apocalypse happened and almost everything is dead

By on 16 Oct 2015commentsShare

Finally, a realistic video game about the coming apocalypse.

In Mushroom 11, the world is in ruins, humans are gone, and you — a fungus — are trying to piece together what the hell happened. Now, I’m no gamer but, fungal sentience aside, this seems like a pretty believable portrayal of what would really happen if civilization takes a turn for the worse.

After all, microbes were roaming the Earth millions — and in some cases, billions — of years before we were, and they’ll be roaming it long after we’re gone. So whether it’s nuclear war, climate change, or rampant swine flu, you can bet your ass that fungi — and all their bacterial and viral friends — will be much more likely to survive whatever’s coming for us than, say, Denzel Washington, or Viggo Mortensen and that clueless kid.

Here’s more on Mushroom 11 from Motherboard:

The game revolves around playing as a blobby hunk of shroom that explores the empty Earth. You use the mouse to eliminate parts of your mass to create more, branching new bits of you in another direction. A kind of rapidly hardening Play-Doh that navigates the landscape, solving puzzles, taking on bosses, soaking up small insects and other mushrooms for points.

… Your just-sentient protagonist’s lack of self-consciousness and speech doesn’t stop the story. The narrative develops around you, the world leaving clues for you to stitch together.

The creative lead on the game is Julia Keren-Detar. She told Motherboard that she wants her next game to be about the Great Famine of 1315, which spurred a bunch of wars and caused a devastating plague that wiped out 70 percent of Europe:

“I’m only going to focus on the famine part. Keep it simple,” said Keren-Detar. “Apocalypses are these strange, fun things.”

Fun is one word for it. Personally, I wouldn’t mind turning into some “rapidly hardening Play-Doh” myself every time I think about the precarious state of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

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You Play a Post-Apocalyptic Fungus in ‘Mushroom 11’

, Motherboard.

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You play a fungus in this video game, because the apocalypse happened and almost everything is dead

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Alaska Governor Says State Needs More Oil Drilling to Pay for Climate Change Damage

by BlytheT619 Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Yep. In an interview with the BBC’s Matt McGrath, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker just made perhaps the most remarkable statement I’ve ever encountered.

“We are in a significant fiscal challenge. We have villages that are washing away because of the change in the climate,” Walker said. Relocating these villages is proving to be “very expensive,” he continued.

McGrath asked, “So you’re saying that given the climate change impacts in Alaska, you need to be allowed to continue to drill and explore and produce oil to pay for some of those impacts in Alaska?”

Walker’s response: “Absolutely.”

The response on Twitter was immediate and harsh, especially from climate activists:

Unfortunately, this is the situation we find ourselves in as America trends toward petrostate politics. As the Hill notes, Alaska has no sales or income tax and derives a significant portion of its revenue from fossil fuel production on public lands. In a very real way, the recent dip in oil prices has hit the state hard—just as climate change impacts have begun to intensify. In one particularly stark example, although this year’s wildfire season was a record-breaker, the state had fewer resources with which to attack the blazes due in part to budget cuts linked to lower oil prices.

The situation has grown still worse in Alaska in recent weeks: In late September, Royal Dutch Shell suddenly announced it was abandoning plans to drill offshore of Alaska’s northwest coast after it failed to locate oil in any meaningful quantities during its controversial exploration this summer. As McGrath notes, that oil may have given a boost to the flagging Trans Alaskan Pipeline, now just one-quarter full due to flagging production on Alaska’s North Slope. Without oil as a reliable income source, Alaska’s politicians have begun a tough look inward to re-envision their state’s future. Apparently, that reality check hasn’t yet reached the governor’s office.

Alaska is America’s front line on climate change. What’s happening there is, in many ways, a preview of what the rest of us are in for should the world continue on something resembling the worst-case scenario path. Let’s hope when that time comes, politicians in the Lower 48 won’t be quite so shortsighted.

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Alaska Governor Says State Needs More Oil Drilling to Pay for Climate Change Damage

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The Science of Why Pumpkin Beer Arrived So Early This Year

by SallieAguirre Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It was scorching in Oregon this summer. So hot the autumn pumpkins ripened early.

Which meant the brewers at Rogue, best known for Dead Guy Ale, found themselves picking pumpkins five weeks ahead of schedule and concocting their annual pumpkin-flavored beer long before the dog days slipped away. (Last year, Rogue’s Pumpkin Patch Ale wasn’t released until October 7.)

“Oregon’s heat-wave sped up the growing process this year, giving us ripe pumpkins in the middle of August,” Rogue said in an announcement on its website, in early September. Pumpkins weren’t the only crop affected. Malting barley ran late, while hops and corn grew early.

The release of pumpkin beers, like the appearance of candy corn and Christmas lights, have become yet another disorienting marker of the passage of time, often arriving before people are emotionally ready for it. Given the blazing temperatures in Oregon, Rogue was lucky its pumpkins fared so well. Excessive heat, like excessive rain, can decimate a pumpkin crop, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

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The Science of Why Pumpkin Beer Arrived So Early This Year

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Raw Data: Here’s How Black Kids Are Really Doing in School

by PhilippSweetappl Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby is pretty ticked off at the way our “journalistic elites” cover black kids. In particular, he’s ticked off at liberals who seem to care only about black kids getting shot, and conservatives who care only about promoting scare stories that make our public schools look as horrible as possible:

You will never see those people ask how black kids are doing in school. The reason for that seems abundantly clear:

None of those people care!

Just for the record, this is what score gains in math look like over the past twenty years. You’ll see these data nowhere else.

Twenty years?!? How about 40 years? I’ve got that for you right here, courtesy of the NAEP long-term assessment, which has used a similar test for over four decades precisely so that it’s possible to make reasonable long-term comparisons. On the math test, black kids have improved their performance significantly: by 36 points at age nine, 36 points at age thirteen and 18 points at age seventeen. If we use the usual rule of thumb that ten points equals one grade level, that looks pretty good. And the gap between white scores and black scores has shrunk as well.

So maybe our schools are doing pretty well, after all? Maybe so. But at the risk of being a wet blanket, I’ll point out one thing that makes all these score gains a little less uplifting: Since 1990, 17-year-old black kids have made no gains in math at all—and the story is the same in reading. Over the past 25 years, younger black kids have improved by one or two grade levels, but those gains are completely washed out by age 17. There may be good explanations for this. School reforms haven’t hit high schools yet. A lower dropout rate means there are more mediocre kids still in school at age 17. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But one way or another, nothing matters unless our kids are doing better by the time they finish school. Until we figure out how to keep high school from being the black pit that it apparently is, none of the score gains in lower grades really matter much.

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Raw Data: Here’s How Black Kids Are Really Doing in School

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The Secret Decoder Ring for Donald Trump

by MarceloBoyd Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dan Drezner, an allegedly serious professor of international relations, insists that we attend to two Donald Trump nuggets today. Twitter makes this kind of thing far too easy. First is this one, from a Rolling Stone profile:

With his blue tie loosened and slung over his shoulder, Trump sits back to digest his meal and provide a running byplay to the news….His staffers at the conference table howl and hoot….When the anchor throws to Carly Fiorina for her reaction to Trump’s momentum, Trump’s expression sours in schoolboy disgust as the camera bores in on Fiorina. “Look at that face!” he cries. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

And now for the explanation, as told to Trump’s biographer:

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.

You wouldn’t be surprised to hear a first-grader get all giggly over childish insults about his teacher, would you? That’s what first graders do. At age 69, that’s still what Donald Trump does too.

But it’s actually even weirder than that. In purely conventional terms, Carly Fiorina is both perfectly attractive and perfectly businesslike. Lots of people might think she shouldn’t be president—anyone who cares about actual success in some field of life, for example—but even a stone misogynist’s first thought wouldn’t be that he just couldn’t stand to look at her face for four years. Even Trump’s hand-picked circle of sycophants apparently wondered what he was talking about.

But wait! It’s even weirder yet: Trump says this kind of stuff in front of a reporter? WTF?

Source article – 

The Secret Decoder Ring for Donald Trump

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Kim Davis Is Either Big Winner or Big Loser, Depending on Your Perspective

by TabathaMcVicars Posted on September 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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It looks like I have my answer about what will happen when Kim Davis reports back to work in the Rowan County clerk’s office:

One of Davis’ deputy clerks, Brian Mason, said he will continue to issue licenses even if Davis instructs him to not do so. “Because of the federal court order,” Mason said when asked why he might buck his boss when she returns to work.

….Mason patiently answered a dozen reporters’ questions Wednesday when the clerk’s office opened for business, displaying the license he and five other deputy clerks have used since they assured Bunning they would comply with his order. Those revised licenses do not include Davis’ name, instead indicating the license is authorized by “the office of the Rowan County Clerk,” where it once indicated “the office of Kim Davis, Rowan County Clerk.”

….“It was an office decision,” Mason said when asked who authorized the change.

Davis will not have to personally issue marriage licenses to any gay couples, and the licenses themselves no longer have her name on them. This is what she asked for in the first place, so she ought to be satisfied. Right?

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Kim Davis Is Either Big Winner or Big Loser, Depending on Your Perspective

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Republicans Have a Cunning New Plan to Deal With the Iran Agreement

by Elissa01Uvz Posted on September 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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For some reason, I’ve been a whirlwind of blogging activity over the past week or two. Don’t ask me why. Partly, though, I think it’s because it’s so hard to take anything seriously lately. It’s all Donald Trump and Kim Davis and dumb tax plans and other political theater. So I’ve ended up writing lots of short, not-entirely-serious posts about things that amuse me. That’s pretty much all I can find.

Take my lunch break today. I learned two things. First, I like Round Table pizza and I wish my local store hadn’t closed. Second, Republicans have a shiny new plan for dealing with their inevitable defeat on the Iran deal. Max Fisher explains the latest outbreak of serious governing from today’s Republican Party:

The new hotness among Republicans is that they shouldn’t bother voting to disapprove of the Iran nuclear deal, and instead should vote for a resolution that, according to Politico’s Jake Sherman, “would delay a disapproval vote because they believe Obama has not disclosed some elements of the deal.”

….Republicans, in this new plan, would argue that President Obama didn’t live up to his promise to fully inform Congress about the Iran nuclear deal….The alleged “secret side deal” is an agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN nuclear watchdog) and Iran over how the IAEA will conduct certain inspections and verification procedures of Iranian facilities.

The IAEA has such agreements with every country where it works….It is not a “side deal,” nor is its existence secret; the nuclear deal requires the IAEA to monitor Iranian facilities, so naturally the IAEA was going to work out the logistical details of that with Tehran. As nuclear experts Mark Hibbs and Thomas Shea explained recently in the Hill, anyone with the most basic knowledge of the IAEA understands that this is how it works, and that this secrecy ultimately helps the IAEA — and thus the US — against Iran’s nuclear program.

….The controversy is thus by definition impossible to resolve. And that’s precisely the point….The future of Republican opposition to the Iran nuclear deal will thus probably look something like the never-ending political circus over the Benghazi attacks. There will be various conspiracy theories and outrage stories that will live on for years in right-wing media long after they have been debunked. You will hear about “Obama’s secret side deal with the IAEA” from at least one family member at Thanksgiving.

It’s hard to work up the energy to write about this stuff seriously. It just doesn’t deserve it. It’s transparent political theater designed to feed the outrage machine, and it’s apparently getting more attention from Republicans than passing a budget, which they have only a few days to finish up. And even if they do eventually get around to the budget, it promises to be merely another round of political theater as tea partiers vie to force a government shutdown instead.

So what’s a hardworking political blogger to do? Relax and figure that this too shall pass, I suppose. In the meantime, it’s gonna be a long campaign.

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Republicans Have a Cunning New Plan to Deal With the Iran Agreement

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